Nortel Buzzboard

Add Australian contact center outsourcing specialist PCI to the list of companies that are taking energy efficiency into consideration when building their networks.

In this press release from last week, PCI CEO Phil Allan is quoted saying: “As with any large-scale technology rollout one of the biggest costs is the energy to power and cool the equipment. Nortel demonstrated such a clear lead in this regard with its energy-frugal equipment that the savings in ongoing operation and lower TCO were reasons alone to choose its solution, not counting all the other benefits it offered.”

PCI, who is building a new 6,000 square meter facility in Melbourne to accommodate its growth, is deploying a solution built on the Nortel CS …

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Analyst firm In-Stat says that the practice of using custom ASICs by some equipment vendors is putting them at a disadvantage for energy efficiency.

In an Information Alert published last month entitled “Going Green - Network Equipment Vendors Address Energy Efficiency,” In-Stat says that:
Vendors who are already designing equipment with advanced off-the-shelf silicon solutions will have an advantage. These vendors will benefit from both favorable regulations and the technological know-how of large chip vendors like Broadcom, who offer solutions with significantly higher energy efficiency and processing capacity.
To quickly break down what that means - the term “off-the-shelf silicon solutions” refers to an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), which is basically a microchip that …

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While green may be the ongoing industry topic, it’s the specific subject of energy efficiency that is really hot and it keeps putting Nortel in the news headlines. As I first pointed out earlier this year, this blog’s readers seem to be much more focused on the energy efficiency of Nortel’s enterprise data portfolio — and the substantial savings it can enable — than the broader discussion of general eco-friendly activities.

Is that bad? No, it’s just simple economics. Just like high fuel prices are the main reason drivers are trading in their SUVs for hybrids, high energy prices are the main driver for enterprises to start thinking green with their …

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The elusive, mysterious Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator. Where is this thing?

It’s almost like the “Economic Stimulus” checks in the U.S. that the IRS is supposed to be sending — we’ve all heard a lot about them and it sounds great, but has anyone actually seen one? And so it is with this Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator (or the NEEC as us Nortelians like to call it). Sounds great, but let’s see it already.

The NEEC first peeked its head into public view in March at VoiceCon, where it was briefly mentioned in this release. It was also on the Nortel booth, and No Jitter had this post after seeing it first-hand. The NEEC then had a starring …

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With all the noise that Nortel has been making around energy efficiency, it’s inevitable that the investigative reporter inside some in the media would start to dig into the fact vs fiction of some of our claims.

One of those is Jason Hiner, who runs a blog on TechRepublic aptly named “Tech Sanity Check.”  Today he has a detailed post here on the reality of some of the energy efficiency claims that Nortel has aggressively pushed in the last month.  It’s a great post and well worth the five minutes to read it.

As part of his due diligence, Jason talked to Mark Fabbi of Gartner Group.  Among other insights, Mark commented that …

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Yesterday’s Nortel ads in the WSJ and San Jose Mercury news — as well as the online presence — created some buzz here and there.  And as you can see from the comments to yesterday’s post, there was a general “Go Nortel” excitement about it.

While it was good to get a strong reaction to an ad that was meant to get your attention — that’s not enough.  The goal of the ads was to help create a conversation with customers about energy efficiency, about the Cisco energy tax, about a topic where Nortel believes we have true differentiation.  But once that conversation gets started, the “wow” of the ad has to be backed up by real facts.

The …

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Nortel’s focus on helping enterprises calculate their Cisco energy tax a few weeks ago at Interop has created some buzz with customers, media and bloggers. And that’s not just here on Buzzboard (with posts here and here), but with coverage on Network World’s Cisco Subnet blog, on RedMonk, on TechRepublic, and on a couple of blogs (here for example) that focus on green trends. It was all enough that last week one of Cisco’s data center marketing guys responded on their blog and then followed the trail of coverage with comments trying to pull people back to his post.

While this level of interest isn’t surprising, what is …

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The word on Nortel’s energy efficiency advantages for enterprise networks is getting out there, but not soon enough for some.  On his Lower (Carbon) Footprint blog, Tom Raftery has this post about his Cisco buyer’s remorse.  Tom is a co-founder and director of Cork Internet eXchange - a hyper energy-efficient data center in Ireland.

In the blog post, Tom says that one area where they “chose poorly” was with their Cisco switches - as he points to Nortel’s energy efficiency figures and says that “the independently verified results are astounding.”  Sorry we didn’t get the word out sooner Tom, but kudos for focusing your data center on energy efficiency and reaping the …

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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:

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Like I said earlier this week — everyone’s going green.  It’s morally, politically, and economically the thing to do.  But if you are a business, how do you do it?  With so many opinions (and cost ramifications) on ways to better your environmental impact, it can be hard for a well-intentioned company to know where to start.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s Q&A with Rick Dipper, Rick and his team put together the below top 10 list for businesses going green.  Take a look and let me know what you think.  Did Rick and his team miss any big ones?  And let us know if your company is doing any of these already.  And if you’re hungry for more info on the …

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