In the United States more than 70 percent of electricity consumed is used in offices. Lighting, heating and cooling systems, telephones, printers and desktop computers all consume energy even when they aren’t being used. The IT industry alone generates 2 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and of that 2 percent a quarter is from office buildings.
Considering the effect office buildings have on our environment it’s clear that something needs to be done differently when managing office space.
That’s exactly what’s happening with Cisco EnergyWise, which is transforming office energy management from simple on and off capabilities to gaining visibility into where energy can be saved and utilized most efficiently. The main challenge that office energy management faces is the discontinuity between facilities management and IT. The former’s goal is to have a building which functions effectively with minimal operating costs, while the latter doesn’t consider energy consumption or costs.
What Cisco’s EnergyWise does is leverage the power of the network to unify facilities and IT. Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices (IP Phones, PCs and other peripheral devices) can be controlled from the data center. By measuring and controlling energy between management applications and endpoints using a unique domain-naming system EnergyWise is able to reduce power consumption.
What does this mean? Think of EnergyWise like a parent-child relationship. The Cisco device (switch/router) is the parent and the endpoint (laptops, printers, cameras, fans, etc.) is the child. EnergyWise domains give the network admin the ability to visually group devices into logical power consumption groups. From here you can monitor energy consumption of these devices, assign them an importance value depending on how critical they are to your organization. This allows you to see how much energy devices are using as well as allowing you to control whether a device is on or off remotely.
To gain a greater understanding of Cisco’s EnergyWise Softchoice has a free eBook available for download here.
About Anthony Rossi
Anthony is an experience IT professional with a diverse product knowledge of networking, including routing, switching, wireless, security, voice, virtualization and storage.
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