In the not-too-distant future, if a new Energy Consumption Rating Initiative takes off, IT managers and procurement departments will no longer have to guess at how green their routers and network devices are.

The ECR Initiative was announced this week at an event in Santa Clara, where Ixia is using its IxGreen solution to gauge the energy efficiency of one of Juniper Networks' router products. The ECR framework grew out of the development of IxGreen, and the ECR initiative itself will be open-source and vendor-neutral, and able to be applied to any networked hardware setup.

The first iteration of the ECR standard itself has been posted online. It lays out the goals of the project as:

1. Define a test procedure for measurement and estimate of energy efficiency for network and telecom equipment
2. Establish a common energy efficiency metric for the network and telecom industry
3. Promote energy awareness and competition between OEM vendors

The specification also lays out the classes of devices that it will cover to begin with, including routers, WAN and broadband aggregators, ethernet switches, security appliances and application gateways.

In recent weeks, wireless routers in particular have been the focus of greening -- or possibly green-marketing -- pushes, as Siemens, D-Link and Linksys all announced energy-efficient routers within days of each other. The development of the ECR standard will aim to make these claims verifiable and comparable, making it easier for individuals and businesses alike to gauge the actual energy use of these products.

More about the ECR initiative is online at http://www.ecrinitiative.org.