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    Maybe Nortel is On to Something

    By Mark Evans | May 26, 2008

    Nortel has been making waves recently by positioning itself as the “green” telecom equipment supplier. Or, at least, more green than Cisco.

    At first blush, it seems like a weird marketing campaign given you don’t think of telecom equipment suppliers as being green or environmentally friendly.

    But when I mentioned what Nortel was doing to someone running a cloud computing start-up, he said it was the smartest thing Nortel had done in a decade.

    How’s that?

    Well, he said companies are becoming increasingly concerned about the high cost of having to operate computing equipment such as servers. This not only the power required to run them but the power needed to cool them.

    With Nortel aggressively the idea of lower power consumption, it plays right into the hands of customers worried about rising energy prices.

    Now, the question is whether this is enough for customers to give Nortel an edge at a time when price and performance still reign supreme. Still, it’s a creative and, perhaps, innovative attempt to build competitive differentiation.

    More: According to an article in The Economist, there are more than 7,000 data centres in the U.S., while the number of servers is expected to hit 15.8 million by 2010 - three times more than 2000.

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    Viewing 10 Comments

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      David and Tony are CTO guys and they know Mandarin and some Indian languages more than they know anything else. Their impact on the telecom industry is zero THANK GOD !
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      I'm not familiar with David Ayers or Tony Pirih. Can someone tell me where I can read about their impact on the telecom industry? I can't seem to find pointers online.
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      The only Green here is Greed.

      The propaganda from this company is a joke. The ELT (Executive Leadership Team) uses the Nuremberg Defense daily to justify the layoffs and fill their pockets.

      Kick an executive in the balls today....show them we're not stupid to believe the endlass crap from idiots like David Ayers, John Roese, Tony Pirih (WTF kind of name is that....go back to MOTO).....let alone those pathetic ZMAILs....really a B.A. in MATH...you think he has the diploma posted in his office. Hey ZMAN go back to your NAZI Sympathetic Homeland!!!!
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      maybe NT is up to something, but more likely they've just noticed it by chance and decided to try to make some noise about it.
      and maybe, just maybe, you're pandering for comments with a headline like that?

      i actually put the "hlt" instruction into an idle loop on one of Nortel's products. not because a manager or designed or architect asked me to do so, not because this was in the functional or design spec, but just because i thought it was an obviously correct thing to do.
      i was surprised that this wasn't done already, like in most OSes. you may be thinking, just a HLT instruction? don't they use more advanced methods of saving energy like frequency scaling, power profiles, etc, etc? keep in mind, this was an x86 based system with many powersaving features available "out of the box". no. most people don't bother with stuff like that.
      they only "do it" if their product uses an OS like linux that does this sort of thing by default. i've never seen anyone at NT (i've been there for 7 years) who has done something like this on purpose. even if they started to do this sort of thing recently, some of the products they are showing off have been around for some time, so i have to come to conclusion that their "success" is an accident potentially coupled with some marketing tricks and/or errors at measurement.

      btw, that one single HLT instruction i put in the idle loop has probably saved a billion kilowatts by now, so i'm very proud of myself :)
      oh wait, what am i saying, that product must be long canceled by now.
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      There was a time when "made in Japan' meant "cheap junk". The vast majority of both low and high end stuff we buy these days is of Chinese origin, and its caused scandal.
      Walmart sells imports plus its own generic "Great Value" items and has been blamed for pretty much everything under the CO2-hazed sun:
      "Walmart forces local rivals to close, dominates suppliers, acts as a chicken-fried culture czar, is widely blamed for the sorry state of retail wages in America."

      Should my Nortel server crap out do I complain: "Walmart prices forced us to buy Nortel gear".
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      ....it was the smartest thing Nortel had done in a decade.

      This is a sad statement and i hope it is not true. What I am left wondering is what did they do a decade ago that he thinks was smart?

      OTOH the old "Brown and Green" big iron switch colours had roots in the environmental movement in the 70's
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      You wrote:
      "Now, the question is whether this is enough for customers to give Nortel an edge at a time when price and performance still reign supreme. "

      >>> You should also take a look at Nortel's price and performance...Nortel data equipment is much less costly (capex and opex [mnt / power) as well as higher performing than Cisco. It has been that way for a while, but the Cisco marketing machine is a tough thing to combat.
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      Further proof of the relevance: According to a 2007 Gartner report, the global information and communications technology industry accounts for approximately 2 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, a figure equivalent to the aviation industry.

      Source: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867
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      If Nortel allowed its employees to telecommute (using Nortel EQ, natch) they would lower CO2 emissions of auotmobiles. But raise telco emissions. But use less electricity than, say, them IBM folk. Oh, wait, theres some partnership going on with them, so lets stick with wasteful Cisco. The USA of the global information and communications technology industry. Born and raised in USA. Figures.
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      This figure sounds absurd, particularly when all of mankind only contributes about 3% of CO2 to the atmosphere.

      CO2 is insignificant to global warming and does not cause GW.
     
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