Cisco Energywise - Welcome to Green IT 1.0
Today was a very good day. Guppies everywhere take note.
With a little hype we announced the first energy management application in the IT industry using the network as the platform for monitoring and controlling infrastructure. Cisco EnergyWise was announced today at our Cisco Networkers event in Barcelona, Spain. This announcement represents many months of development within Cisco and from key partnerships to address energy management at scale. The scale in this case refers to Cisco networks, we have a few installed. The solution comes through normal IOS upgrades. Now, currently installed Cisco products can become well, energy wise, get it?
Joking aside, existing Cisco products can now act as the aggregation point for energy consumption data from anything with an IP address. Proprietary reporting…problem solved. In its first iteration and with the help of an agent, EnergyWise can also shut it off. Proprietary shutdown…problem solved. But what about automation you say? At the risk of sounding like a Ginsu commercial, yes it does that too. It allows for policy-based management. Part of the policy is the ability to put different classes of infrastructure into different power states (10 power states in fact), then correlating this process with time of day type policies. This gives you a scalpel where only a club existed before.
It also allows for a cloud-based approach to controlling energy allocation to assets through tagging. This improved approach to network management not only simplifies on the existing model, it now includes energy as a controllable element. The implications of this approach we have announced today are massive. There has been no real technology option to date that offers the scale and ubiquity of this approach. A single control plane, standardized measurement, automated control, open and across Cisco IP-backbones globally are all elements of our approach. As this approach matures it will provide more and more visibility and control into facilities infrastructure like HVAC and lighting through our acquisition of Richards-Zeta today. The technology from this acquisition will provide broad protocol conversion and mediation capabilities into building management networks.
Perhaps the biggest impact this technology implies is the ability for a wide range of users to “take the grey out of green”. Using this platform allows users to commonly report on their energy use, correlate it to C02 and take action to improve it. All this is done across globally pervasive Cisco networks. Now, corporations and governments alike can approach energy management in a whole new way.
Welcome to the future of Green IT, ubiquitous energy management for the masses.
Here is a video from the developers of EnergyWise sharing their thoughts on its development.
We are of course looking for early adopters, both users and partners so if you have an interest in delivering energy as a service using this approach then please comment and indicate your interest. We will not publish your details if you so indicate.
Stay tuned to this blog as there is a lot more coming down the pike on Cisco’s approach to energy and how this tool can provide big savings in a down economy. As mentioned in earlier posts we ballpark Cisco will save in the realm of $30M USD (kWh savings) by deploying it across our enterprise. This will be the first active reduction tool we employ (shutting things off) to meet our public commitment of a 25% absolute reduction by 2012. Care to join us?
Posted by Rob Aldrich at 11:39AM PST
Troy Benjegerdes Feb 19, 2009
I would like to work with Cisco on open protocols for power measurement and monitoring.
Please contact me at , and see the http://grid.coop website.