“Today’s decision-makers are the most connected, best informed buyers in history,”

Lauren Flaherty, chief marketing officer at Nortel. 

Too right Lauren. It features the Nortel energy efficiecy calculator (found here). You have to register to use it (cunning piece of lead generation there Nortel). Nortel are pushing the notion that Nortel kit uses significantly less power than Cisco.

We are a little stuck on the green bandwagon right now, but that is no bad thing. It is nice to see Nortel putting issues like this to the fore. [There was a broken link on the Nortel site, it is now fixed - fast work, well done!]

The actual page is here. They are claiming to reduce energy costs by up to 40%. See you what you think… It is based on a Tolly Group study. I’m not saying anything else.

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Last year Gartner put IT on a par with the airline industry for CO2 footprint (“Green IT: Why it matters” ZDNet). Environmental issues, driven by the Corporate Social Responsibility agenda, are making people to think hard about that power use. But using less energy also saves money, and that is good business sense as much as environmental sensitivity.

Energy is a big ticket item for IT. Cooling uses as much, or more, power as servers themselves, which is creating a spiraling demand. Virtualization has got a new lease of life, speaking a new coat of green paint. It reduces the number of servers and their power usage. VMWare’s Rob Smoot talked though server virtualisation, and also the benefits of virtualization for the desktop. Thin clients reduce power and extend desktop machines life. Sun was ahead of the times after all.

Robb Boyd quotes Doug Gourlay on the history of constraints: first we were space constrained, then cooling constrained and now we are power constrained. Rob Aldrich - Cisco’s Mr Green – focussed on efficiency and sustainability, putting ‘green’ to one side as a politically loaded term. A good point, and a neat angle to follow.

The number of apps and the amount of data will continue to grow (The Exploding Digital Universe). The slight curve ball is where cloud computing plays into this. However, that moves the problem, rather than fixes it. The fact is, it is time to look carefully at IT power consumption, if you aren’t already.

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