Network power management: A step closer to green

BANGALORE, INDIA: Ever thought how much you are adding to the greenhouse gas emission, when you leave laptops, desktops, or cordless phones in power mode, usually after office hours, or while you are away for an elaborate lunch on Fridays? It is enormous, both in terms of dollars for a company and carbon emission.

In an era when network has become cohesive and connects almost all devices in an organisation, and even across multi location offices, network provides significant opportunity for CIOs to leverage it as a platform to do power management, believes Avinash Purwar, SVP, Borderless Network, Cisco.

Avinash, in an interview with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL, talks about Cisco's EnergyWise, an important service of the company's Borderless Network Architecture (launched in 2009 that combines routing, switching, security and wireless products from Cisco), which as per the company will drive customers towards Green IT. Excerpts:

CIOL: How will EnergyWise help companies to go green?

Avinash: When we talk to enterprises in India, we find that green is the agenda that CIOs and CEO like to implement in order to save cost and reduce greenhouse gas emission.

There are multiple devices that are connected on a corporate network ranging from computing devices, such as PCs, wireless access points, laptops to communication devices such as smartphones, iPhones etc. These devices continue to use power even if they are not in an operational mode.

EnergyWise is a technology for Cisco Catalyst switches that, in a  proactive way, measures, reports and reduces  energy consumption of IP devices such as phones, laptops and access points.

Customers can optimise power consumed by such devices using EnergyWise, which provides a management platform that is made using EnergyWise Orchestrator. EnergyWise Calculator studies user behaviour in terms of power consumption on a network, based on which energy policies can be implemented so as to control them.

CIOL: Does EnergyWise work with all kinds of systems on a network?

Avinash: Currently we are supporting computing devices. 

Cisco is working to integrate EnergyWise Orchestrator into other building management systems, such as lighting, cooling, power systems etc., so that networks become a single platform to manage power consumption.

However, as of now this is not in the market.

Whereas, we have provided open APIs, which are available on EnergyWise Orchestrator, and are in serious discussions with several leading consumer electronics makers so that their systems can be integrated with EnergyWise Orchestrator.

In future, we will be announcing more devices under EnergyWise. Some of them will be using EnergyWise Clients and some of them will integrated with open APIs and EnergyWise Orchestrator.