GreenTouch Consortium Passes 50-Member Milestone, Adds Seven New Members

AMSTERDAM ‒Oct. 4, 2011 ‒ GreenTouch™, a global industry initiative dedicated to dramatically improving the energy efficiency of information and communications technology (ICT) networks by a factor of 1,000, today announced that seven new organizations have joined the consortium, bringing the total number of member organizations to 53, and involving more than 300 individual participants.

The new members – four academic institutions, two manufacturers and a research laboratory – will collaborate with existing GreenTouch members to research and invent technologies that will enable more energy-efficient networks, plus create the network architecture, specifications and roadmaps that will define them.

The new members are:

• CommScope/Andrew – United States
• Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – United States
• Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) -- Korea
• Universität Paderborn – Germany
• University of L'Aquila – Italy
• University of Rochester – United States
• ZTE Corporation – China

"These seven organizations bring a varied set of approaches and ideas that will help advance our goal of reinventing telecommunications as we know it today," said Gee Rittenhouse, chairman of the GreenTouch Consortium and newly named COO of Alcatel-Lucent Software, Services and Solutions. "Their energy and enthusiasm will add tremendous value to many projects already under way within the consortium."

(Statements from five of the new GreenTouch members appear at the end of this announcement.)

The next GreenTouch Members Meeting and Open Forum takes place at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., November 14-17, 2011. GreenTouch will unveil its comprehensive Roadmap during the morning session of the Open Forum on November 17; attendance is free to the public, but advance registration is required.

Membership in GreenTouch is open to any organization or individual that is committed to environmental sustainability and to supporting the consortium in realizing its vision. 

About GreenTouch

GreenTouch is a global consortium of leading service providers, academic and industrial research institutions and non-governmental organizations working together to define the challenges, identify the trends and issues and develop solutions that will achieve the goal of delivering within five years the architecture, specifications, roadmap and demonstrations of key components needed to increase the energy efficiency of ICT networks ‒ in particular, the service provider networks that make up the Internet ‒ by a factor of 1,000 from current levels.

In June 2010, GreenTouch received an award for energy efficiency innovation at the Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards event. For more information, go to greentouch.org.

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GreenTouch and the GreenTouch logo are trademarks of Stichting GreenTouch.

STATEMENTS FROM NEW GREENTOUCH CONSORTIUM MEMBERS

 “ZTE Corporation shares the vision of a sustainable, energy-efficient future for information and communications technology networks," said Xu Feng, Vice President of ZTE. "We believe the GreenTouch Consortium will play a decisive role in realizing that vision, and we welcome the opportunity to take part in such an ambitious effort and work with other leading experts from across the industry and around the world.”

"As our society's collective consumption of digital information continues to grow exponentially, new 100G and large-scale computing centers are being deployed to meet these requirements. In the face of rising energy costs and decreased energy supply – and constrained financial resources – it's critical now more than ever to build and operate networks connecting the data centers in the most energy-efficient way possible," said Steve Cotter, head of ESnet at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "As a member of GreenTouch, ESnet looks forward to contributing to research and working with other members to drive global leadership and eventual adoption of innovations in this important space."

"KAIST shares the vision of a sustainable, energy-efficient future for information and communications technology networks," said Jun Kyun Choi, professor and project leader at KAIST. "We believe the GreenTouch Consortium will play a decisive role in realizing that vision, and we welcome the opportunity to take part in such an ambitious effort and work with other leading experts from across the industry and around the world."

"We are very much looking forward to the work in the GreenTouch consortium. Our practical experience in both telecommunication and cloud systems as well as our research on fundamental tradeoffs of energy versus other performance metrics might be an asset to a wider range of ongoing or future projects," said Professor Holger Karl, head of the Computer Networks research group and the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, Universität Paderborn.

"We firmly believe that energy efficiency has acquired a central role in the design of telecommunication networks for the future. Joining GreenTouch is a unique opportunity to strengthen and share our effort toward the finding of fundamentally innovative solutions," said Antonio Mecozzi, Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of L'Aquila.