Older: 
The Cisco Energy Tax - Or is it the Hummer Tax?
Once again there is a lot of focus on the energy efficiency of networking gear and the significant differences between products in how effectively they use energy. Nortel is calling this the Cisco Energy Tax, and it can significantly increase the Total Cost of Ownership of a network. I wrote about this in a posting a few weeks back; Green Makes Sense, but I thought it was worthwhile commenting a bit more now that there is more detail up on the Nortel site and on YouTube.
As I commented before, there is a real difference in the power consumption of Nortel data products and Cisco equivalent products. It is enough that if you replace all the Cisco gear in the world with Nortel products, it is equivalent to 20% of the US automobiles in carbon emissions.
A while back I got into a long dialog with a number of folks (some from Cisco) about whether using merchant silicon was better than custom. Now it appears there is another strong reason to use the more sophisticated merchant silicon; power consumption. For quite a while, the engineers at Intel and AMD have realized that designing efficiency into their chips is both common sense and good business. It would appear that the merchant silicon vendors have either listen to Intel and AMD or hired from them as their designs reflect the same good engineering as the large chip houses in terms of energy consumption and efficient design. As Cisco builds it's own chips, we can only assume that the engineers designing those chips did not learn or understand that lesson of the value of power efficiency in chip design.
I guess the touted comparisons that Cisco products are like a Ferrari that some in Cisco tried to put forward were close but wrong, the Cisco products are closer to Hummers; big, flashy and real energy hogs. You get all the weight and consumption and it is not even fun to drive!!! I guess that would make the Nortel products more akin to the Prius, tailored to the need and optimized for efficiency. Perhaps it is time to consider the energy efficient and green alternative?
