Juniper Networks and Ixia, a provider of IP performance testing services, have set up a new Energy Consumption Rating (ECR) Initiative designed to test the energy efficiency of telecoms equipment and networks.

The effort, set up in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, consists of a set of standard tests on a range of equipment categories, including core router, edge router, multiservice router, BRAS devices, common edge devices, carrier and generic Ethernet platforms, according to its first draft proposal to the industry.

“Energy efficiency is an increasingly important factor in customers’ decision and evaluation process, but to-date there has been no reliable, standardized method for testing the efficiency of networking equipment,” said Matt Kolon, Asia Pacific CTO for Juniper Networks. “By participating in the launch of the ECR Initiative, Juniper is not only helping advance the industry towards its efficiency goals, but is also validating the advantage Juniper’s platforms such as the T1600 have in this area.”

ECR aims to be completely neutral and welcomes participants and users from network equipment manufacturers, government agencies, carriers and enterprises. According to Juniper, ECR has developed a vendor-neutral energy efficiency metric that creates a common energy denominator between different network and telecom systems. Energy efficiency is defined as energy consumption normalised to effective throughput – in other words, the methodology assumes “the more energy efficient network system to be the one that can move more data (in bits) using the same energy budget (in Joules).

As part of the launch of the ECR initiative, a T1600 Juniper core router was put through the tests. According to Juniper, “the T1600 has been verified as the industry’s most energy-efficient core router, with a performance-per-energy unit rating of 9.1 watts per Gpbs.” The tests were performed at Ixia’s iSimCity in Santa Clara, California using its IxGreen energy measurement solution.

The companies however, did not revealed whether or not products from other network equipment makers were tested, nor did they provide any further, comparable energy efficiency information of other equipment.

Juniper is not the first company to tout its energy efficiency horn. Nortel Networks has been running a major marketing campaign focused on the energy efficiency of its equipment over rival Cisco’s, going as far as to coin the term, “Cisco Energy Tax” to denote the energy overhead of its rival’s equipment over its own.