Nortel Buzzboard

Last week at Interop, Nortel was pretty aggressive in getting the word out with claims around the energy efficiency advantages that Nortel’s enterprise data solutions have over Cisco. We had a “Calculate your Cisco Energy Tax” demo at the Nortel booth, Joel Hackney had this guest blog on what customers are saying about Nortel versus Cisco, and we also issued a press release that included quotes from 50 customers that had chosen Nortel’s enterprise data solutions.

UPDATE: See Computerworld’s video from the Interop show floor on the Nortel energy efficiency calculator.

Apparently not everyone agrees with our energy efficiency claims. In this rather harsh comment, Roy Osterberg called our Nortel vs Cisco comparisons on the booth “stupid and deceptive,” and accused us of “lying and miss-representation” for the purposes of marketing.

Now I’m not 100% sure, but a quick Google search shows me that Roy Osterberg is likely a dedicated Cisco employee, though he didn’t call himself out as one in his post and didn’t use a Cisco email address.

But to ensure that we were being on the up-and-up with our Interop demo and to respond to some of the allegations that Roy made, I had our product expert respond - Vince Garr, our Lead Sustainability Engineer at Nortel:

Roy thanks for stopping by the Nortel booth at Interop. I’d like to address the comments and concerns you raised and assure you that Nortel was in no way misleading any visitors to our Nortel energy efficient demonstration.

The first point of clarification is that our Nortel Energy Efficiently Calculator uses publicly available maximum power information provided directly from the manufacture (Cisco, Nortel, etc). Most customers understand that no network runs at “max power” - but using this based line provides customers with a consistent model that they can play with to model current or future deployment scenarios as they see fit. They can also reduce this max number by any % if they want a more “real-world” scenarios based on their situation.

Second Nortel did not have a BayStack 470 in the booth as part of this demonstration. I think you must have mistaken this for Nortel’s ERS 5520-48-PWR POE switch that we were testing vs. a Cisco 3750E-48-PD. We also tested Nortel’s ERS 4548GT-PWR switch vs. a Cisco 3650E-48-PD equivalent.

Just to be clear - all of these switches are POE switches - so I’m not sure I understand your non-POE switch comment.

While it would be virtually impossible for two vendors to have identical switches, these products are representative of what Nortel and Cisco would position in customers networks that required medium to high scale 10/100/1000 Ethernet switching port density with POE (and stacking) at the network “edge”.

I will point out that these products do have some price / performance differences to be sure. Depending on the model - Cisco’s price is often 2X more expensive than the “equivalent” Nortel switch - for example the CDW (US) price for a Nortel ERS 5520 is $ 5,241 vs. the Cisco 3750E costing a whopping $14,345.

The other big difference is that Nortel switches outperform their Cisco equivalents in stacking performance and lower latency - but I digress, back to your concerns over the Interop demo.

What this testing clearly showed was that Nortel switches used 20-40% less energy “out of the box” when compared to the equivalent Cisco switch. We were not loading the switches with traffic or powering up the uplink ports (although we have done this type of testing in our Nortel benchmarking labs with similar results) - at Interop we were simply testing the idle states of the devices. The numbers don’t lie - Nortel switches use less power (and cooling). Not bad for a product that also costs far less and offers superior performance.

Finally with reference to the Tolly reports, I’d like to point out that, ‘Yes’, Nortel has worked with Tolly for validation and independent testing for several years. In fact so has Cisco.

In this latest round of Tolly POE Energy Efficiency testing, Cisco was notified in accordance to Tolly’s Fair Testing Charter and given an opportunity to respond to the testing methodology being used and products involved to offer feedback before any final testing is done. Cisco had no comment. Maybe they should have spoken up?

Once again, Roy, I am glad you stopped by our booth. We wanted to use the show to tell customers the fact vs. fiction they often receive from our competition. We may not have met at the show, but I am pleased to have cleared up the facts for you here.