Green VoIP

Recently organizations such as Climate Savers Computing Initiative and Green Grid have formed to raise awareness of corporate computing power consumption. To deal with huge amounts of data storage, and huge amounts of multimedia data traffic flowing over the Internet, companies large and small are building seemingly limitless banks of servers, leading to a vast increase in electricity usage.  The expansion in servers and the energy they use is directly related to the non-stop growth of the Internet, and shows no signs of abating.  Every day, more databases and more media sources are connected and come online.

This surge in high tech energy consumption has led major corporations with socially responsible agendas to formulate energy conservation policies, including sponsorship of energy usage organizations.

At the same time, as chip vendors such as Intel and AMD have addressed chip architecture, cooling, and performance issues by creating multi-core devices, overall power consumption of the chip -- and motherboard and server itself -- continues to increase.

Leading the list of power-hungry server applications are voice and video over Internet, sometimes referred to as VoIP or VVoIP. Already video data, driven by improved cell phone web access, now consumes 1/4 of all Internet bandwidth.

Implementation of core network VoIP and VVoIP equipment has traditionally been a power hungry undertaking. Providers either implement proprietary "refrigerator size" boxes filled with large, specialized electronics, or they implement "rooms stacked with servers", an approach that has come to be popular with the advent of usable, low-cost open source media software that runs on standard Linux machines (e.g. Asterisk, OpenSER, etc).

For the server bank approach, now there is a better way -- a green way -- that doesn't sacrifice voice quality or performance, but lowers power consumption by 10 times or more. And at the same time it reduces cost, reduces floor space, and avoids licensing costs typically required by x86 servers running VoIP applications.

For more information, continue reading at Reducing Data Center Power Consumption for VoIP.