Managing energy use in a network with a new SNMP Power State MIB

Energy consumption has become a major factor in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT equipment. The power state of IT equipment is effectively ldquoinvisiblerdquo to the network making it difficult to measure or control energy use. In this short paper we propose, prototype, and evaluate a new SNMP power state MIB and its agent to expose equipment power state to the network. The power state includes all supported power management (PM) capabilities, current PM settings, total and current active, inactive, and sleep times, and statistics on wakeup and sleep events. With knowledge of the power state of network devices, a network manager could remotely audit the energy consumption of IT equipment and make changes to PM settings. We have implemented a subset of the power state MIB for Microsoft Windows Vista desktop and server computers.