Miercom Certifies H3C Data Centre Switches 'Green'

3Com has announced that Miercom, a provider of independent testing services, has named its H3C S12508 data centre core switch and its H3C S5820X top-of-rack switch the industry’s first data centre class products to receive the Miercom ‘Certified Green’ designation.

“Lowering power consumption while maximising capacity are top concerns among enterprise CIOs. This is especially true in the data centre where energy costs are rapidly escalating and where power limitations can inhibit the scale-out of IT capacity to support business operations,” said Saar Gillai, 3Com Senior Vice President, Worldwide Products and Solutions.

The Miercom testing confirmed that the H3C switches are designed to provide enterprise customers performance, scale and resiliency while using up to 50 percent less energy than competitive solutions, helping to lower the cost of data centre operations.

“By the end of 2010, more than 50 percent of large data centres will reach maximum power consumption levels, leaving consumers in a major energy crisis as these organisations will be unable to scale data operations to support their business needs,” says Andreas Antonopoulos, Senior Vice President for research-advisory firm Nemertes Research. “This means power efficiency and accurate data on power consumption is absolutely vital for the future. To avert this crisis, organisations need to not only measure their own data on power consumption, but also, they need to begin demanding that vendors disclose all product efficiency data in order to serve as a key criterion for customers, who are choosing the tools that will best provide them with sustainable next-generation data centres.”

The Miercom certification detailed several factors that provided 3Com’s H3C solutions with a distinct advantage over other products including: a modern design that leverages the latest full feature/ low power ASIC technology, highly efficient modular I/O components and power supplies and a set of power saving features that can be configured through management.

In addition, the report highlighted H3C’s Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology as another 3Com “green” innovation that further reduces energy consumption by helping customers to simplify and collapse network architectures into flatter, two-tier network designs, requiring fewer discrete platforms and network layers, and further reducing power and cooling requirements.

“The switches were proven in testing to offer maximum throughput while consuming less than half of the power for 10GE modules compared to the published specification for competing vendors’ modules,” said Rob Smithers, CEO of Miercom.