Power management is an increasingly important consideration in managing
networks.
Adding sFlow counters to allow agents to report on power and temperature would
provide useful information for power optimization.
/* Energy consumption */
/* opaque = counter_data; enterprise = 0; format = 3000 */
struct energy {
unsigned hyper mJ; /* energy in millijoules */
unsigned int pf; /* power factor (expressed as a percent), 0 for DC
power */
}
/* Temperature */
/* opaque = counter_data; enterprise = 0; format = 3001 */
struct temperature {
int oC<>; /* array of temperatures (1 for each thermometer) expressed in
degrees Celsius */
}
Each measurement is scoped by the data source reporting it. In the case of
energy, a switch might report total energy for the whole box (as measured by
its power supply) and may also report energy for each of its PoE ports.
Adding these counters to sFlow (currently contained in proprietary SNMP MIBs
if available at all) would provide an efficient, multi-vendor way to track
power usage and temperature across all the devices and links in the network.
SFlow counter polling is very efficient, providing a scalable way to monitor
the large numbers of devices in a data center.
Peter
