D-Link has announced the introduction of two first-to-market business-class unmanaged Green Ethernet switches. Developed to enable small to medium-sized enterprises to reduce their energy costs and optimise energy efficiency, the new DGS-1016D 16-port and the DGS-1024D 24-port high performance Gigabit switches claim to deliver energy savings of up to 45 per cent when powered down.

According to the company, the new switches don’t require any changes to existing network infrastructure and should not show any difference in performance over other switches. While it is too early to be certain, D-Link believes that reduced heat and power output should lead to greater longevity. The real question however is what impact will Green Ethernet have on consumption. The company says:

In early 2007, IEEE formed an Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) study group investigate this idea of power saving with network equipments when PCs and laptops (most of which ship with GigE cards now) LAN links are idle, or not utilizing full bandwidth. Researchers have estimated that in the U.S. alone, companies could collectively save $450 million a year in power costs by using such a technology.

Those savings may be ambitious and at the top of the range because according to Green Ethernet:

The following are some typical values estimated for US energy savings from EEE:

• 1 Gb/s link EEE: $250 to 300 million per year
• 10 Gb/s link EEE: $40 to 80 million per year

See this document for the detail.

In a SOHO environment, actual savings will depend on the cable length used. At present the optimum length is 20 metres.

This is one of the first announcements in what I see as a general trend towards managing power use in computing infrastructures. It is not an easy task because there are numerous complexities and interweaving factors that dictate exact power usage. In the scheme of things, the savings outlined are a flea bite when compared to total power usage. But at least it is a welcome start.

If it wasn’t so serious, it would be comical. Yesterday, Pakistan’s government decided that YouTube was no longer welcome in its citizens’ browsers and demanded that ISP’s block it. Unfortunately this lead to what amounts to a DOS for the whole of YouTube. Despite it being said that YouTube was unreachable for 40 minutes, I couldn’t access the site for several hours.  The BBC was the first to report it noting that:

BBC News has learned that the nearly two-hour long blackout was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and internet service provider PCCW.

The country ordered ISPs to block the video-sharing website because of content deemed offensive to Islam.

The BBC News website’s technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan’s citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom “hijacked” the web server address of the popular video site.

There will definitely be some fallout from this Darren Waters Read more on Darren’s blog

Those details were then passed on to the country’s internet service providers so that anyone in Pakistan attempting to go to YouTube was instead re-directed to a different address.

But the details of the “hijack” were leaked out into the wider internet from PCCW and as a result YouTube was mistakenly blocked by internet service providers around the world.

The block on the servers was lifted once PCCW had been told of the issue by engineers at YouTube.

As might be expected, the world and his dog is having a piece of this, variously ridiculing PCCW and noting the seriousness of the event. Richard Stiennon captured the mood of many when he says:

A religious state, Pakistan, identifies a content provider, YouTube, as the source of blasphemous, seditious content and orders, King Canute style, that the Internet tides be stopped. A zealous ISP ignorantly decides the best way to comply with the decree is to re-route all of YouTube’s IP addresses to whatever site they thought was more appropriate.

Regardless of the reasons for the intial ban - and some at least think it is more political than religious - the fact the action taken by a single provider can disrupt an entire service should be of concern to anyone running internet based services. The impact was wider because with all the YouTube traffic going into Pakistan, it lead to the country being an internet black hole for a time. While the consensus view is that the incident occurred as a result of an accident, according to Ars Technica:

This vulnerability has been known for a long time, and smaller scale accidents of this nature happen at regular intervals. But so far, efforts within the IETF to make the Border Gateway Protocol, which governs Internet routing, more robust against this type of accident (or attack) haven’t produced any results yet.

The potential for malicious persons to invoke similar actions is enormous and I suspect that appropriate action will now be taken to ensure that this cannot be repeated.

The last few days I’ve been engaged in a fire storm with NetSuite. I asserted that its customer numbers don’t add up, or at the very least don’t make sense. Almost immediately I incurred the wrath of the corporate PR department. Instead of answering the questions raised, they chose to go in the offensive, making the classic knee jerk reaction mistake of not reading my disclosure page as carefully as they could have and ascribing affiliations to me that do not exist. It was a fiery few hours to say the least. In the cold light of day however it’s interesting to dissect what’s happening.

NetSuite has provided customer figures over the years. 6,000 in 2003, 5,300 in its pre-IPO S1 statement quoting figures at March 2007, 5,400 at a presentation in December, 2007 and 5,600 in its most recent earnings statement. During the most recent analyst call, CEO Zach Nelson said they had added 432 customers in the last quarter and expected to continue adding at a rate of 300-500 per quarter in successive quarters. The impression created therefore is that customer additions are proceeding at a consistent and steady clip. But even a cursory examination suggests the numbers are not quite as suggested. To its credit, NetSuite’s PR pointed out that the most recently quoted numbers are ‘active customers.’ But then I have heard from one NetSuite implementer that it takes 30-60 days to get a customer up and running.

During one call, Craig Sullivan, VP International said to me there was bound to be a certain level of dropout from 2003 because at that time the company was serving a different type of customer, one that might not need everything the company offers. He also conceded that prices had increased. By implication, that might deter some customers from renewing their contracts. Net-net, I still can’t make sense of the figures and as I said elsewhere, at the time of writing, the company has not furnished an explanation of what I see as a disconnect between fiscal growth and the absolute number of customers it is serving.

What does this have to do with transparency? Netsuite is not obliged to give out customer numbers but has chosen to do so. That’s very much to its credit. But, it opens the door to further questions when apparent inconsistencies arise. That’s even more germaine for this company because the CEO likes to take public pops at the competition, implying that competitors are losing business to its offering. Anyone familiar with the software industry knows this is par for the course and such remarks are often rendered in jocular tones. Nevertheless, they are an integral part of the overall ‘character’ of a company as perceived by outsiders.

James Farrar, who runs CSR for SAP recently wrote about the value of transparency. Quoting Frank Buytendijk of Oracle (and previously Hyperion), he said:

Transparency is a competitive weapon to differentiate from the competition in attracting capital, informing customers about the value proposition (not only price) and in cost efficiencies by driving down the transaction costs in the value chain.

James then goes on to point out concerns about this kind of behavior, noting Nick Carr’s lament that:

You have to wonder whether, as what was once opaque is made transparent, the bolder among us will lose the incentive to strike out for undiscovered territory. What’s the point when every secret becomes, in a real-time instant, common knowledge?

I disagree because I was brought up to believe that honesty and openness are the best policies. But given the current position with NetSuite, one has to wonder whether Nick has a valid point. In this case, NetSuite appears to be in something of a hole. It is difficult to see how it can satisfactorily explain the apparent modest growth in customer numbers in the context of Mr Nelson’s assertions about future growth without admitting to a significant rate of customer attrition. Whatever it does, the company has a stark choice. Clam up or put its cards in the table. The natural response among IT companies is to find a way of obfuscating the position through elaborately worded PR statements. But in a world that increasingly demands transparency, it is hard to see how that is possible. This from fellow Irregular Maggie Fox:

Transparency means simply that if you have a lousy product or lousy customer service, you can no longer hide it. It is not voluntary. Just by using the Google, I can find a thousand different opinions about your products and services, and I weigh those collective voices (some more than others) when deciding where to spend my money.

Maggie is talking in the context of playing the social media game, something that is mostly seen as optional by corporations and often applied to consumer goods companies. In this particular case I’m thinking about an interpretation of facts. That can equally be seen as a question of opinion forming because whatever is said is bound to colour the judgment of potential future buyers.

Regardless of the outcome, it is apparent that we are far removed from having perfect insight into the realities behind the numbers that corporations choose to present. Nevertheless, the demand for transparency will not go away because that particular Pandora’s Box is already open. It will be interesting to see what emerges over the coming days.