A business armed with information, technology, and the ability to easily and intelligently control powered network devices can see cost savings of up to $270,000 over a 5-year deployment — including 750 tons of CO2 emissions reductions. This return on investment often spans far beyond recovering original technology costs to include benefits such as improved building security and fostering an employee culture for environmental responsibility.
Meraki Cisco MS220-8 Cloud Managed Switch - Technical Specifications
Adding intelligence to powered network device
PoE devices such as IP phones are becoming more prominent as businesses adopt new technologies. This creates additional opportunities for cost savings through the reduction of off-hour energy consumption.
Meraki switches add several intelligent features to your network for monitoring power draw. By leveraging standard protocols, Meraki's cloud readily displays real-time PoE information on a per port, per device, and global switch basis. This data can quickly be analyzed to determine how much power draw your PoE devices are consuming in a given 24-hour period.
Additionally, Meraki switches perform intelligent PoE budget allocation by analyzing discovery protocols for device-advertised power requirements. This means your PoE switch budget is used more efficiently across all of your switch interfaces.
Port Scheduling
Meraki's Port Scheduling feature allows you to define one or more weekly reoccurring schedules that can be applied to selected switch ports within your network. For example, a typical office building may have an 8am 6pm operating schedule.
This new schedule can then be applied to all access ports throughout the building with a single dashboard click using Meraki's virtual stacking technology. In Figure 2 below, you'll see that a subset of 18 ports (across 4 switches) have been selected and configured with the new schedule.
Configured within minutes, this port schedule can add significant cost savings for the life of the deployment as well as provide additional security in the building during off-hours.
With the power of Meraki's cloud, configuring and deploying a repeating port schedule to switch ports across your building, campus, branch locations, or any switch deployment is done with incredible ease.
Smart power budgeting
The Meraki dashboard supplies detailed, real-time statistics about your PoE devices and overall switch power budget usage. Additionally, using discovery protocols, the switch will snoop for — and only allocate — the advertised power amount per device. This adds efficiency to per-port power budget allocation and also provides IT administrators with detailed power consumption information.
Wake on LAN (WoL) Live tool
- Adding energy-saving policies directly to access devices, such as workstations, can also significantly contribute to energy savings. However, from time to time it may be necessary to remotely wake or access a device that is in a low power state.
- Cisco Meraki switches include a feature that allows administrators to send WoL (Wake on LAN) packets to a specified device in order to wake it up. This live tool can save lots of time yet still allow for administrators to wake — and gain network access to — a device in standby.
- Meraki tested the impact of port scheduling on a typical2 enterprise switch deployment in order to highlight the impact of this easy-to-use yet powerful feature. All four models were tested (MS22, MS22P, MS42, MS42P) and our findings were documented.
- A port schedule was created and then applied to all access ports on the test switches. This included all ports except the uplink (trunk) port. This schedule could be applied during off-hours to disable all access ports when devices are not in use.
- A control test was run with all ports active for a 24-hour period. Subsequently, a second test was run to capture the impact of the activated port schedule, again for a 24-hour period. This test procedure was repeated for all four models, with a 75% (285W) PoE power draw added to the PoE model switches. The results were then compared to highlight the change impact of the applied port schedule.
- Let’s take a look at the cost savings analysis across several common deployment scenarios. Figure 6 below illustrates the five-year cost savings that can be achieved when configured in a multi-branch deployment, a distributed enterprise deployment, and a campus switch deployment.
- If we take the findings highlighted in Figure 3 of our power study above and an average cost of 9.87 cents3 per KWh, the five-year energy savings achieved can be up to $270,000, including 750 tons of CO2 emissions reductions
- Creating port schedules using Meraki's dashboard takes only three clicks, and doesn't require in-depth training easy to begin reaping the cost savings of this feature. Let's take a look at a locally managed vendor’s solution for comparison.
- Being able to configure port scheduling on locally managed switches typically requires hosted management platforms or 3rd-party integration and software. For example, let's investigate a typical setup required for an HP ProCurve switch deployment.
- To set up and configure port scheduling, the HP network management utility ProCurve Manager Plus (PCM+) and CLI knowledge are both required. After following Meraki's deployment guide for port scheduling, which consists of staging the necessary port CLI commands and then scheduling them, a port schedule can be enforced.