For the first time since Nortel launched its high-profile global marketing campaign earlier this year highlighting the so-called ‘Cisco Energy Tax,’ Cisco has officially responded with the company’s own energy efficiency story.

Following CommsDay’s lead story last Friday on the why Nortel’s campaign is good impetus for the industry to drive energy efficiency, Cisco Asia Pacific contacted us to tell their side of the story. Andre Smit, managing director of Data Centre Sales at Cisco Asia Pacific, tells CommsDay that the story should not be simply about comparing the wattage of individual boxes, but must be about the entire architecture within a data centre.

“It is not just an equation of how much power we consume, but how much we can save our customers through the reduction of other components that they can reduce from the network,” Smit said. “Through innovation, we’ve been able to utilize the assets within a data centre 70% more efficiently. And through this, we have not just increase the efficiency of our product, but reduce the amount of other products that customers have to put in the network. If you can achieve utilization of 70% on the assets, that is a massive difference to our customers, because typically, the utilization of data centres is between 15%-20% - that is a massive leap for customers out there today.”

Smit’s comments are addressed directly at the CommsDay story on how Nortel is leveraging the findings of a report that shows its equipment consumes up to 45% less energy that comparable Cisco equipment – the difference of which Nortel has coined the term, the ‘Cisco Energy Tax.’

CAMPAIGN LIMITED

In his view, the campaign’s message is limited because it focuses only on a small portion of the entire power consumption within a data centre, and is an isolated figure that discounts the benefits of Cisco’s equipment in reducing the energy requirements in other parts of the data centre environment.

According to Smit, a typical data centre uses 50% of its power on cooling, 3% for lighting, while 10% is loss through power conversion. Only 37% of the energy actually goes to powering the IT infrastructure. The energy required to support the IT infrastructure is what Cisco calls the ‘burden factor’ which ranges between a factor of 1.2 to 2.5 times.

“So for every IT unit that you put in a data centre, say you consume 800 kw, you are putting 1.2-2.5 times of that in other equipment to support that unit,” Smit said. “It is not just a measurement of each equipment that you put in there, it is a measurement of everything else that you have to increase to sustain every piece of equipment that goes in there. There’s a bigger picture connected with power savings. You can’t just compare what is going on from the wattage that every single piece of equipment uses. It is how you actually implement the architecture into your data centre.”

A similar argument is put forth by Smit for the energy consumption of storage devices within data centres.

“If you look at storage today, you get very inefficient usage. Storage currently uses 35% of the power of the data centre’s IT infrastructure, but typically only 15%-20% (of the capacity) is utilized. If you can do this more efficiently, and put this into VSANs, virtual SANs, and use our MDS product for example – which once again gets hammer because it uses so much power compare to competitors – they can replace 10-20 of a competitor’s boxes,” Smit asserted. “And we increase the efficiency of all the devices sitting around it, from a load of 30% to up to 60%, so our customers don’t have to put more and more storage in there, we make it more efficient, more used in the environment, by implementing the right technologies, architectures for our customers. Once again, the VSAN technology is not done by anybody else, only we do it.”

At the end of the day, Smit is confident that the company’s customers will be able to see beyond the marketing of its competitors and see the real benefits of Cisco’s solutions.

“The first thing that our competitors go to a customer and says is, ‘your box uses 2 times the power of our box’,” Smit said. “Our customers listen initially to the power story, but when they look at the architecture correctly, look at the solution correctly, they quickly realize that the 10%-20% increase in power equates to a much bigger saving and more efficient use of their infrastructure that completely nulls and voids the entire argument that anybody else out there.”