By: Mark Seery

Mark Seery — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:16:21 +0000

Hi Rob,Operational costs have always been and will always be a business concern. Therefore the message of operational cost savings through energy efficiency is a universal message that has always resonated and will always resonate even if the degree of mindshare may shift according to fluctuating energy costs. For this reason I was very pleased to receive a briefing from Cisco recently on Data Center where the focus was on energy efficiency”" and not “”green”". In the long run this is the right line for Cisco to take IMO.Semantically overloading energy efficiency with “”green”" has numerous messaging complications. Firstly, all efficiencies reduce costs. In the short term both cost and energy usage goes down. In the long run the reduced costs (increased efficiency) facilitates faster expansion due to lower marginal costs which leads to greater energy usage. Consider networking equipment, it has always been more energy efficient (per bit) with each successive generation of products. Has the overall energy consumption of deployed networking equipment gone up of down during the history of the networking industry? Up I would suggest. Success breeds success. The more efficient networking and computing becomes, the more it will be used (until some productivity blocking event is reached). Energy efficiency is only green if it comes with a permanent cap on energy usage so energy efficiency is not green in and of itself, not to mention how misleading carbon reduction estimates can be if you have no idea what the energy source is.Secondly if someone believes that fossil fuel based energy is causing global warming then the only green solution is to replace that energy source – something which equipment suppliers have little control over unless they are willing to get creative about how they partner with people building data centers.Lastly, is any one at Cisco really qualified to have an opinion on global warming? Weather systems are incredibly complex and complicated non-linear systems. Every year scientists are adding new variables to the models in an attempt to make them more accurate, but it remains questionable whether there is yet enough computer processing power to truly model these systems (consider the attempts to try and use all the distributed desktop capacity to do so). Yes scientists deserve our respect, and yes we should listen to them. But just as we might observe that it is difficult for some of the smartest people in the world to get something like BGP4 dampening 100% right, it is many times harder to get weather modelling right even if improvements are being made every year. We should balance respect with perspective – does anyone at Cisco know how much energy efficiency is needed to save the planet?Energy efficiency is a simple concept to understand and Cisco’s contribution to addressing that issue is somewhat bounded and clarity in messaging easier to achieve. Taking on the green thing really takes a significant amount of messaging sophistication, extending solutions well beyond where Cisco is today, jumping on a political hot potato, asserting things which are beyond Cisco’s control (what energy caps customers have, what energy sources they are using, etc.), and an assessment that green marketing will have long run legs.From my perspective, Cisco is headed in the right direction with its messaging and solutions on this issue. In fact I will go so far as to say it is a refreshing change. It is pragmatic reflecting the difficulty of getting green messaging right and at the same time still articulates value to customers.On the other hand there may be a difference between how Cisco solutions are marketed and how Cisco itself, the corporation, is marketed. For example if Cisco has come to a conclusion that it should make a contribution by managing its own energy usage in a different way and should become “”green”" by whatever criteria Cisco would use to define that, then that is totally different and subject to a different decision criteria.”

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Comments on: Al Gore’s Challenge

By: Mark Seery