August 10th, 2009
Juniper offers up white paper on energy efficiency for networks
The efforts of Cisco and IBM to extend the energy efficiency debate out of the data center and out into the network have been highly publicized, but I’ve made a pledge to myself to actively explore what other networking equipemnt providers are doing in this area. (Note to any networking vendor reading this post: you are more than welcome to reach out with a legitimate energy-efficiency measure but spare me the greenwashing, please.)
I was poking around on the Juniper Networks site for potential topics, when I stumbled upon this white paper, “Energy Efficiency for the Network Equipment: Two Steps Beyond Greenwashing.” This rather scientific discussion of the topic suggests methods by which businesses can test the relative energy performance of comparable systems. Juniper calls this an energy consumption rating (ECR) and it considers both energy consumption and the effective system throughput in bits per second.
Of course, as Juniper explains in this paper, both of these numbers are often expressed in very different ways on data sheets. Not to mention that they can be affected by all sorts of factors, such as peak utilization or equipment degradation over time. So Juniper offers a number of tips for how you can collect the relevant data (what it might be called on a spec sheet). Plus it gives you a way to assess how much impact a different might make. For example, an ECR difference of 20 percent would translate into a savings of $200,000 in operating expenses. A 50 percent different would save $500 million. And so on.
Personally, I think this paper is a great vendor-neutral resource for any network or IT managers trying to gauge the relative efficiency of networking equipment.
Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist in the New York area with more than 20 years experience covering the high-tech industry. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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