ATIO goes green with Nortel

Specialist ICT services provider and Nortel Gold Partner ATIO has put its weight behind Nortel's recent commitment to decrease the energy consumption and carbon footprint of its products.

Neville Quinton, Business Unit Executive of ATIO, says: "We stand firmly behind our selection of Nortel as ATIO's flagship data solution. This choice has paid significant dividends over the past two years and has been reinforced by Nortel's recent emphasis on the environment."

Nortel's focus on 'going green' is part of an active shift by governments and corporations globally to lower power consumption from an environmental and cost-saving point of view.

All Nortel's products are designed accordingly, and the immediate benefits can be seen in its data range of products where organisations can save up to 50% in power consumption. In a relatively large network of 2 500 users, this means saving 7 106 metric tons of CO2 emissions over a five-year period - the equivalent of the emissions produced by 249 small passenger cars each travelling 169 000 kilometres.

Independent research by The Tolly Group in January 2008 benchmarked the Nortel Enterprise Ethernet Switch (ERS) 4548GT-PWR and 4550-PWR against Nortel's main competitors, demonstrating that the Nortel products consumed 56% less power on average without sacrificing performance. In fact, Nortel outperformed its main rivals in:

* Layer 2, zero-loss throughput
* Rapid recovery from link, switch and server failures
* Rebounds from switch failures (seven times faster) and from link failures (four times faster)

The report states: "The perceived myth among IT staff is that the safe network investment is to side with the market leader. In today's networks though, three factors emerge as the key to successful implementations - performance, resiliency and total cost of ownership (TCO). The vendor that delivers the greatest combination of those factors is positioned best to serve the needs of enterprise networks. Frequently the market leader is not the best choice at delivering a rounded offering with optimal performance, unflappable resiliency and competitive TCO."

According to Quinton, ATIO recently replaced its own data infrastructure with Nortel's ERS 5520 switches.

"The benefits, especially with regards to performance and manageability, were immediately evident," he says. "We are looking forward to contributing to the environment (even if it is in a small way at first) by reducing CO2 emissions through lowering the power consumption of our data infrastructure. Imagine the positive impact it could have on our environment if some of our large financial and government institutions with more than 30 000 employees did the same."