Vampire Loads are also known as Phantom loads that are caused by equipment that while turned off, still draw current that you are paying for. A few months ago we put to task measuring and documenting our internal phantom loads- an inventory of our gear to determine what energy savings we could identify and then achieve.
We've written a fair amount this year around the topic of operational expenses (opex) of IP Telephony. I say written "around" the topic because we've mostly discussed whether the potential for opex savings could be what's driving the market to continue investing in IPT despite the overall economic slowdown. But we haven't really taken a systematic look at the opex picture. That's why I was so glad to get Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research on a VoiceCon webinar on this topic (go here to get the replay, and here for the archive of recent webinars).
Some large enterprise executives, staff, and economists are among those who doubt that implementing energy efficient network and telephony gear today will have a positive benefit. A theory that came alive during the oil crisis of the 1970s known as the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate that states, “reductions in energy intensity of output that are not damaging to the economy are associated with increases, not decreases, in energy demand.” This theory goes on to state that “improvements in energy efficiency lead to ever and ever-greater levels of energy usage.”
We had a fantastic webinar last week in which we basically turned the hour over to Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research, who delivered a really useful talk on opex in IP telephony (watch it here). I'll post this week's VoiceCon eNews here tomorrow, in which I discuss Robin's main findings. In the meantime, some side points were noteworthy.
Back in the early 80’s before adoption of any Category-X standards for wiring, we were faced with a decision that couldn’t wait. At the time, we spoke with and visited AT&T (Atlanta Works Wire Division) Dupont, Belden, and Mowhawk Cable companies. The decision to begin the cabling project was pending as was the effort to begin selection of a product for the cable plant. We were about to wire a national landmark and everyone agreed it needed to last.
In my postings I have addressed a series of the design issues associated with deploying QoS and getting clean voice or video traffic across the IP network. I lump those topics into the ‘design’ category, meaning that you structure the network according to those principals (classification, forwarding behavior, bandwith demand and management, etc). But many of us have a set of problems in the network I call ‘implementation problems’ which are basically bugs that go unnoticed until we introduce real-time traffic.
One of our favorite network troubleshooting gurus, Terry Slattery, has put together a very cool-looking network diagram showing the 25 Biggest Network Problems. Not surprisingly, virtually all of them are either directly or indirectly relevant to real-time/voice traffic. I talked with Terry about some of the high- (or low-) lights.
At Interop last week, I had a chance to sit down with Manfred Arndt, who's Distinguished Technologist with HP ProCurve Networking, which has been aggressively going after market share in the switch/routing business. Manfred is co-author of a standard that's going to be increasingly important as enterprises deploy IP telephony and unified communications: Link Layer Discovery Protocol-Media Endpoint Discovery, or LLDP-MED, which is standardized as ANSI/TIA-1057-2006.
If you're in a conference session, and an Ethernet switch vendor tells you to use 10/100 instead of Gigabit wherever you can, you must be in a session on Green IT.
The WAN optimizer is hardware designed to reduce bandwidth consumption. WAN optimizers are designed for TCP traffic, which dominates the IP network. TCP traffic has a lot of redundancy and can be compressed; it does not have the network performance requirements of VoIP traffic.
Here's a WSJ blog that says, among other things, that IT datacenters are responsible for half as much pollution as the airline industry. Green was a big topic at Interop last week, and I'll have more on it in tomorrow's VoiceCon eNews, which will be posted here as well. But for now, some random facts and comments.
Header compression is always mentioned in the same breath as QoS when we discuss supporting voice on an IP network. But it is not about QoS, it is about reducing bandwidth consumption. Header compression is most important on the WAN because that is where bandwidth is constrained and expensive. Let’s take a look at why header compression helps for voice.
Whenever economic issues threaten budgets, management looks at outsourcing to cover budget shortfalls. Networking in the US has long been dependent on in-house technology while in Europe, managed services have dominated. Given this, US executives are already looking harder at managed services, and network operators here are expanding their programs. The question is whether managed services are a good idea, and if so, where optimum value could be obtained.
What's another word for "features," as in "PBX features" (the infamous list of 500-800)? Well, the word that one of the audience questioners used in my SIP session this morning was: Value. As in, "People I talk to are concerned about the danger of losing value in the system" if they migrate to a SIP-based system that provides fewer functions.
Of course: "Functions" = "Value"
Edgar Masri is out as CEO of 3Com, but the real news is that his replacement, Robert Mao, will be based in China. I think that tells you all you need to know about where 3Com sees much of its future, as I discussed in this post from VoiceCon.
I'll have some longer, more in-depth posts on some cool stuff I heard today at Interop, but for now I've got time for just this quick observation, from Al Baker, VP at Siemens, on the subject of SIP trunk availability.
The three key network specifications for real-time (voice and video) traffic are packet loss, jitter and latency. Whenever I talk to folks about these, they understand the packet loss issue and they worry about the latency issue, but there is often little discussion about the jitter. So I wanted to tackle the jitter topic here and lay out both why jitter is a problem and some of the issues around how we measure it in the network.
There continues to be a lot of discussion of the technology of VoIP and IP Telephony (IPT). There is nothing wrong about technology, but buying or leasing an IP PBX is as much a business decision as a technology decision. Since the IP PBX is not a yet a commodity product, there are lots of hidden gotchas, difficult to understand SLAs, odd pricing models and maintenance considerations.
Word’s already out that the OCGD rates are rising worldwide. Panic sets in with folks and cut-and-run are what some consider or do, when they get their next power bill.
Sound like a story?
In the western Lonesome Dove, Cap’n Call said it best: “There ain’t no excuse for bad behavior”--and reminding the IT guys that this was the moment after the character Captain Woodrow F. Call delivered a severe beating to an offending bad guy.
Here's this week's VoiceCon eNews:
Telecom used to be part of the facilities department. Is it time to put it back there?
That might be a little bit of an exaggeration. Maybe it's more accurate to say, You can take Telecom out of Facilities, but you can't take Facilities out of Telecom.
When considering wiring for new buildings or adding on to existing spaces, I think the time to seriously consider wireless is now. The guys buying and trading copper see the precious commodity hitting $10,000 a ton.
The reason is energy, demand and energy. Energy costs continue to rise, demand isn’t slowing and energy shortages continue to befall those that have untapped supplies or those that do have copper available but they just don’t have enough energy supplies to produce copper in order to keep up with the global demands.
After my previous post, which compared power demands for TDM and IP phones, Eric wrote me and asked, "Doesn’t an IP-PBX on a server draw less power than a TDM PBX? Is this outweighed by the multitude of phones?"
The bottom line is: IPT is good, TDM is better and Hybrid is Best for power--- to a certain port/device size.
The telephony manufacturers are quick to point out what they are doing to reduce energy consumption of IP telephones. What they aren’t discussing is, what are you truly saving in energy over what you had before?
I was the moderator and presenter with Jim Davies, CTO of Mitel
on March 11, 2008 of an on-demand webinar and podcast: “Discover the Green of Technology”. We both covered a number of useful tips on energy savings from the data center to the desktop. I cannot go through all of the many recommendations, so I have taken a few of the nuggets from the presentation to highlight in this blog.
We’ve had more than a lion’s share of businesses moving manufacturing operations to China well over the past decade, yet this trend may change. China isn’t energy rich and currently isn’t an economy engine designed for sustainability or green initiatives. Wal-Mart is actively trying to move its Chinese suppliers into sustainability.
Last year in March 2007 I posted a blog, “Another Hit to the Cabling Budget; Electrician Shortage = Higher cabling Costs” at . In that blog I wrote “By 2014, the U.S. requirement for electrical workers will increase to more than 734,000. This is a figure of 78,000 more electricians then are currently employed in the field.”
There are utility incentives and rebates that will help reduce energy costs. These will vary by utility and location. New incentives are constantly being added to these programs. Some utilities are even saying they want enterprises to buy less power because of the construction costs associated with new generation and transmission facilities. Here are some incentive program types that should be investigated:
Do you know what your Power Factor is? And more importantly, do you know how you can raise it?
Power Factor is a Department of Energy-promoted measure of how efficiently you're using power (explained here). DoE says, “low power factor is expensive and inefficient.” Low power factor reduces your electrical system’s distribution capacity by increasing current flow and causing voltage drops.
We've posted a new podcast interview with Steve Timmerman, VP of marketing at Shoretel. You can get to it here.
We've posted a new feature in the right-hand column from Lisa Pierce of Forrester Research, one of the top analysts in this market. Lisa looks at some Forrester data to draw conclusions about where IP telephony adoption is at, and where it's headed.
Ever since installing our first IP-PBX in 1996, we’ve found more ways to install them using existing cable plants. IP-PBXs often work better by themselves on their own cabling infrastructure than those that are converged using just one cable to the desktop. I’ve claimed before--years before QoS, VLANs, network monitoring and assessments and other tools were typical--that by using available resources and installing the IP-PBX as a “phone system” is better for some customers.
Fritz Nelson of our sister site Information Week/TechWeb brought his TechWeb TV crew to Orlando. In this interview, Bill Miller of Digium talks about the role of open source in communications. If you haven't followed Digium or Asterisk or open source, it's a good introduction:
With Amazon’s recent fumble with their EC2 services I think it’s fair to say that “cloud” computing is still in Beta. The network service providers have pending legislation hanging over them and there are many opportunities to blend and merge service offerings together to provide a strengthened hosted platform for users seeking to adopt Unified Communications. In this next evolution of technology, hosted providers have an opportunity to do more than razzle dazzle customers with features while using fewer resources. Isn’t “good management” about utilizing and maximizing your available resources?
One of the big worries with carrying voice or video on an IP network is packet loss. When packets don’t make it to the destination, voice and video quality is compromised. But why is this a big deal when our networks have been running fine for years? Network teams are often surprised about how much packet loss there is in a normal data network. Lets look first at why this is a big deal for voice and video, but not a big deal for data applications.
Who pays for IT and communications power? How much power is used? Can anyone do something about conserving IT and communications Power?
I recently asked these questions of my audience at the Voicecon conference in Orlando in March 20, 2008. No one could answer the questions.
I've been communicating with Allan Sulkin on the ongoing topic of vendor consolidation/spinoffs (inspired by but not directly related to today's Motorola announcement). Here are his latest thoughts:
One of the best methods to observe human behavior is to go to a flea market. Unless you probe, look, inspect and really get into searching all the treasures that flea markets have to offer, then you will miss opportunities.
VoiceCon 2008 was no flea market but there were plenty of treasures and an ample supply of human behavior- only the best being described.
Allan Sulkin sent along this link to a NYT article on "survivor technologies," the chief case in point being the mainframe. It's become a stock comparison, at VoiceCon, to liken the PBX to the mainframe--especially since a certain big software company jumped into the market recently. So the question is, is this as bad a thing as it sounds or as it could be? For that matter, is it even true?
This article, part 1 of a 3-part series, was written by Kevin DiLallo, a partner at Levine, Blaszak, Block & Boothby, LLP.
Enterprise IT buyers face a number of legal and operational challenges when negotiating equipment purchase and maintenance/support agreements with the leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) – like Cisco Systems, Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, and Lucent-Alcatel – and their resellers, such as Getronics, Dimension Data, AT&T, and Verizon Business. Many enterprises choose to buy through resellers because they can get larger discounts that way than they can negotiate directly with the manufacturers; but buying through a reseller introduces a host of issues that might be avoided in direct sales. This article offers a sampling of the problems that our clients have found particularly vexing. The next two installments will discuss other issues that commonly arise in enterprise equipment purchase and maintenance/support agreements.
Lost (at least by me, to be frank) in all the VoiceCon hoopla last week was the anti-climactic death of the 3Com-Bain Capital-Huawei buyout. The deal apparently died last Thursday, and the next day, 3Com's shareholders approved it. That's not quite as crazy as it sounds.
We had a session at VoiceCon on Quality of Experience. Now you probably know that the whole VoiceCon show is a quality experience. But in particular here we are talking about measuring the experience of users of a voice or video conferencing service to judge how well we are delivering good communications. Most of the existing tools available in the industry are measuring how well the network is delivering packets, which we know is important, but it does not tell the whole story on voice or video quality.
It’s clear to me as we move along the VoIP path- that not only is it complex, but it becomes more so, and then to think that the vendors want to add UC/UM to the fold. What are they thinking?
Here at VoiceCon 2008 is Mr. Green reporting in. After meeting with Tony Leger at the Nortel booth I got the feeling and could see the evidence that Nortel sees green. The evidence isn’t just the Tolly Group report showing that Nortel costs less to own than Cisco switches- but they are certainly 41-56% less power consuming than Cisco too.
It's been an exciting week here at VoiceCon, and I've been amazed by the parade of marvelous capabilities I've seen. Unfortunately, I do not see myself finding value from any of those capabilities anytime in the foreseeable future. I'm sorry if this frank assessment bruises the feelings of the dedicated but fundamentally misguided purveyors of these solutions (most of whom don't use these capabilities either), but might I suggest that it's time we got back to basics.
I had breakfast this morning with Scott Hilton and Mike Leo of 3Com, who steadfastly refused to tell what's going to happen when the company reconvenes its shareholders' meeting this Friday to figure out whether and how to go ahead with the private equity buyout of 3Com (assuming they can go ahead). But we did discuss 3Com's global strategy, which will continue to be very China-centric regardless of whether the U.S. government freezes Huawei out of the 3Com deal.
Lou D'Ambrosio just finished his keynote, and his emphasis was on customer service as a key to helping enterprises overcome the fact that, as D'Ambrosio put it bluntly, "We are in an economic slump." And when you get into the nitty-gritty, this has a lot to do with the contact center.
OK, I am a bit off my usual topic. But I am also not in my office digging through test files from a clients network or patching up a router’s QoS configuration. Instead I am in a nice room at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando attending the VoiceCon conference. It’s just the first day but it promises to be an exciting week. My most interesting conversation today was with Norman Worthington, who is the CEO of Star2Star communications. They build a distributed PBX. Really!
As usual, I spent my first morning here at VoiceCon doing podcast interviews (they’ll be posted on the VoiceCon website shortly). I got some interesting perspectives on presence from Paul Lopez of NEC (details at this No Jitter blog post), and I also got some more data on contact center attitudes from Tom Chamberlain of Aspect (info about their announcement is here here and here).
Are quality concerns about VoIP a thing of the past? According to a paper from Converge! – “The technological advantages of VoIP are therefore clear. The start of the VoIP takeover has already begun.”
Inter-Tel was a terrific company, but who knew it was almost 3X more valuable than Bear Stearns?
My buddies are funny. They actually do relate to music, art, and better than the generations before them. Then, they bring up good points and arguments about telephony that even I find to be true or truer than most of what today’s generation states what they believe to be as factual.
There’s a difference.
Fifty-three percent of IT executives who participated in the Nemertes benchmark entitled Advanced Communications Services 2008 told us that their organization was already using, or planned to use SIP trunking services in the next 1-3 years, with 26% noting that they were planning for deployment in the 2008-2009 timeframe. For a technology in relative infancy, this was a pretty astounding number.
Per my Costa Rica post below, Cisco is highlighting a survey indicating a growing demand for IT professionals in Latin America. Cisco worked with IDC to develop the data.
Back on February 19th I posted a note about real-time monitoring and why it is so necessary for supporting voice and video on the enterprise network. Today I want to look at some of the tools and vendors that provide this monitoring, and look at the tradeoffs for using the different methodologies they employ.
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VOIP is now mainstream and no longer a "leading edge" technology. TDM is nearing end-of-life. If you haven't already, it's time to make your plans. READ MORE »
VoIP and cellular telephony have matured, moved on and converged. In future, we'll have powerful connectivity solutions for heterogeneous networks that enable easy, transparent and efficient access to services, anytime and anywhere, available on our preferred communications device. READ MORE »
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