Communications Service Providers (CSP) have started to actively optimize the costs of energy of their networks and Telco and IT clouds. Some of the reasons for higher energy usage are attributed to the growth of 5G, virtualization and cloud-based networks. 5G, potentially, consumes up to 4 times more energy compared to earlier technologies, and while CSPs have adopted cloud-based technologies to enhance their operations, this has resulted in higher energy consumption in their networks. The drive for low-cost energy solutions has risen in the last 2 years as it became apparent that worldwide data centers account for almost 2% of total CO2 emissions, causing a financial burden on the CSPs and enterprises.

As a result, CSPs and enterprises are looking at ways to reduce their energy consumption through energy-efficient technology, renewable energy sources, and tools for operational efficiency. As per a Gartner report, 53% of CSPs reported that green energy/hardware optimization for sustainability was a very important technology use case for them. 34% of these CSPs are currently deploying this use case, and in 2 years, another 32% will deploy it.

To address this challenge, CSPs can leverage several energy optimization strategies within their cloud infrastructure. This industry trend is acknowledged by network equipment manufacturers and software vendors as well. The challenge facing the CSPs is how to power profile the Telco clouds that run their 4G and 5G networks. Another question that CSPs grapple with is whether by correlating energy KPIs and network KPIs, they would impact the customers’ experience?

In this article, we explore the monitoring of Telco and IT cloud power consumption, identifying servers and applications that consume most energy, and finding a way to reduce the energy consumption of cloud environments.

A Service Assurance system can typically monitor and optimize network performance through near-real-time measurements, across all network domains and vendors. This concept is now extended to the Telco and IT cloud energy consumption measurements. By continuously reporting end to end Telco and IT cloud power consumption, the CSP can identify the servers that are consuming the most energy. By adding Intel power management technology to the Service Assurance system reports, potential energy savings can be achieved by CSPs. Here are some examples to show how this works.

1. Identifying underutilized equipment: Large Telco/IT clouds contain tens of thousands of servers and IT equipment that are often underutilized and waste energy. Identifying those servers and devising the right optimization approaches and automation routines to reduce their power consumption can yield massive savings.
2. Visualizing energy consumption and performance: By linking end-to-end energy consumption and performance at network/services (4G/5G/IT apps), the system can drill down to specific network domains and layers between a hosted network function and its hosting infrastructure.
3. Creating energy usage profiles: These energy profiles can cover Telco/IT cloud network functions and applications identifying their carbon footprint and linking them to Quality of Service offered.
4. Generating Insights: Identifying patterns and business logic for optimizing energy consumption with Intel Platform Telemetry Insights to convert the infrastructure telemetry information into key metrics.
5. Automation: This involves creating a flexible and open framework to model and automate specific scenarios for power savings.

MYCOM OSI's Service Assurance solution powered by the integration of Intel Platform Telemetry Insights can provide CSPs with comprehensive visibility into energy consumption, visualization and correlation of multi-source metrics, baseline establishment and real-time alerting, vendor-agnostic network function carbon footprint benchmarking, and flexible design options for automation.
On top of these KPIs, the CSP can calculate potential energy savings, using Intel Infrastructure Power Manager technology. This optimizes the energy consumption of the Telco cloud workloads/applications and verifies that no impact is made on the cloud’s performance, after the optimization is done.

This integrated solution has the potential to enable CSPs to optimize energy utilization in the Telco/IT cloud, reduce costs, and ensure service quality, making it a compelling value proposition for the commercial teams to make informed decisions about optimizing energy usage, and reduces costs of the Telco/IT cloud. It also helps the CSP’s operations teams with real-time monitoring and instant drill-down capabilities, providing visibility into power consumption in slices: network, technology, network function, and server. Thus, CSPs can continuously monitor and track energy usage across various technologies, vendors, and network domains, significantly controlling and optimizing their OpEx.

MYCOM OSI is an active member of the Intel® Network Builders Program.