Juniper Networks and test and measurement vendor Ixia this week said they have authored a framework for measuring the energy efficiency of network and telecommunications devices.

The Energy Consumption Rating (ECR) Initiative provides methods to estimate, project and regulate the energy efficiency of telecommunications and network equipment. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory also collaborated on the metric.

The ECR metric defines procedures and conditions for measurements and calculations, and can be implemented with industry-standard test equipment, the companies say. The companies may have a hard sell, however, as a minority of IT shops consider energy efficiency a key factor in equipment purchase decisions. 

The test equipment can operate as a "control point" for integrated measurements, and reports on a multivendor environment, with time-correlated energy and external load analysis. Real-time ECR "performance per energy unit" graphs and statistics can be constructed to analyze energy consumption in reference to offered load, the companies say.

The final performance-per-energy-unit rating, expressed in watts/Gbps, can be reported as a peak (scalar) or synthetic (weighted) metric that takes dynamic power-management capabilities into account.

The Draft Specification 1.02 of ECR is vendor neutral, the companies say, and can be adapted to upcoming energy-related information and communication technology standards and laws. It is free to the public.

The ECR initiative itself is "open" to network equipment manufacturers, government agencies, carriers and enterprises. The specification and additional details are available at the ECR Initiative's Web site. 

Cisco and Nortel also provide energy-efficiency calculators, but they are intended more as promotional vehicles for their respective products.  Cisco says it is pursuing industry "green" standards for network systems through such organizations  as the International Telecommunication Union, METI, ATIS and The Green Grid.