A. Cisco® EnergyWise is a Cisco energy management architecture that transforms the Cisco network into an intelligent energy management control plane. Using energy wise IT operations and facilities can leverage the Cisco network to measure and fine-tune power usage and to realize significant cost savings. EnergyWise focuses on reducing power utilization on all devices connected to a Cisco network, ranging from Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices such as IP phones and wireless access points, thin clients and IP turret systems, through PCs and Laptops, to integration with IP-enabled building and lighting controllers. It uses an intelligent network-based approach, allowing IT and building facilities management applications to understand, optimize, and control power across an entire corporate infrastructure, potentially affecting any powered device.
Q. What are the benefits?
A. The tangible benefits associated with EnergyWise include:
• The network discovers EnergyWise manageable devices, monitors the power consumed, and takes actions to reduce power consumption while maintaining business productivity.
• Organizations can lower their TCO by reducing energy consumptions and costs, and by simplifying energy management solution deployments.
• Power levels and priority levels provide fine-grained control of how network infrastructure and endpoints react to network-based control signals.
• EnergyWise can promote companywide sustainability by reducing energy consumption across an entire corporate infrastructure.
• Network security is maintained by using authentication between management systems and the network, between clients, and between network devices.
• Future enhancements include device location, which enables customers to understand power by device type, device label, and device location. For example, a management station can ask the Cisco EnergyWise network to summarize the power of desktop IP phones within a single building. EnergyWise understands which devices are IP phones, where the IP phones reside, and which ones are designated with the desktop label.
• Network intelligence acts as a proxy, allowing easy communication with diverse endpoints and enhanced scalability. Cisco EnergyWise converges disparate networks, services, and network-attached devices into a common view and set of policies for measuring and optimizing organizational power consumption. Furthermore, Cisco EnergyWise is designed to integrate future devices, network applications, and management tools to accommodate evolving organizational requirements.
Q. What enhancements to Cisco EnergyWise are being announced today?
A. Cisco is announcing the partnership with industry leaders such as Schneider Electric, Johnson Controls, Inc., Lenovo, Eaton, Telstra, JoulEx, 1E, Wafer Systems and others, bringing unprecedented operational impacts and extending the reach of Cisco EnergyWise into different verticals and market segments.
In addition, Cisco is announcing an improved EnergyWise support on its new IP-pones Families (69xx, 89xx and 99xx) enabling a new Power Save Plus mode for a more user friendly and flexible control of the Cisco IP-phones operational status, resulting in up to 87% power savings on IP phones.
Schneider Electric integrated its Buildings management System with ICT energy management by providing Cisco EnergyWise support on Schneider's ModelX iBMS Gateway. This announcement reinforces Schneider Electric's and Cisco's commitment to deliver integrated building energy management solutions that incorporate industry-leading equipment and solutions, so that businesses are able to more effectively manage energy consumption and costs across their entire building portfolio. From one point of management and control, a customer can get a unified view of facilities and campus IT energy consumption.
The new EnergyWise iBMS Gateway and Cisco EnergyWise enabled Borderless Network technologies and platforms, including the Cisco Catalyst Switching portfolio and ISR G2 Routing platform, can reduce IT energy spend by as much as 30%, which can effectively result in a 7-8% overall reduction in energy costs for a building.
The partnership between Cisco and Schneider Electric will provide a first of its kind solution for companies looking to accurately measure their energy usage by allowing any company with Cisco switching and routing infrastructure to easily monitor, control and report the energy consumed by network-attached devices, including IP phones and PCs, across their entire corporate infrastructure.
Lenovo ThinkPad is the first computer product to support Cisco EnergyWise natively. The ThinkPad has the ability to measure its power consumption and report it to IT administrator or management application. The combination of an enterprise using Thinkpads and Cisco energywise will allow management application to report energy consumption as well as implement energy savings policies across an enterprise using. They can do so by leveraging Cisco energywise network service and the newly introduced ThinkPad Cisco EnergyWise instrumentation. This seamlessly integrate ThinkPad power management with the rest of campus IT energy management enabling enterprises to get a better and unified picture of its energy usage and implement better policies across its IT assets.
Eaton integrated its PDU with Cisco EnergyWise and is in the process of integrating its UPS solutions with it. This will enable Eaton and Cisco customers to better monitor and manage branch and enterprise energy consumption. Eaton products will be accessible directly from the Cisco network by any EnergyWise enabled management application. This will enable easy, secured and scalable monitoring as well as policy implementation using the power of the Cisco network.
JouleX continues to enhance its Energy Management application (JEM) integration with Cisco EnergyWise. It is now available globally and is already being used by customers to get a handle over their energy usage and comply with internal energy savings goals and external regulations as well as by managed service providers that offer energy management services to Cisco customers, using the Cisco EnergyWise network service.
CA has enhanced its integration with Cisco EnergyWise. It is now taking advantage of the full powers of Cisco EnergyWise network service to discover, query and easily access IP connected end devices over a Cisco network. CA ecoMeter together with Cisco switches and routers that run Cisco EnergyWise already help customers reduce energy consumption and save money.
1E has integrated Night watchman for servers with Cisco EnergyWise. This offering extends 1E's data center management solution to new layers of the infrastructure stack, as well as to campus IT. Cisco and 1E customers will be able to take advantage of this offering and to both consolidate IT energy management across the enterprise and gain the advantages of one point monitoring and control as well as reach new depth of coverage within the data center across servers network and infrastructure elements.
Ayehu has created an automated deployment solutions for Cisco EnergyWise that aligns with Cisco goal to reduce complexity by consolidating energy management over the existing network. Ayheu product further advances this goal and help make EnergyWise one of the simplest energy management solutions to setup and configure.
Q. What enhanced EnergyWise functionality is available on the new Cisco IP-phone?
A. A new Cisco EnergyWise "Power Save Plus" mode is available on the Cisco Unified IP Phone Series 69xx, 89xx, and 99xx. This reduces power consumption on Cisco Unified IP Phones in off-hours, resulting in a substantial cost savings. This technology works by having the Cisco network signal the Cisco Unified IP Phones to go into a Power Save Plus mode, thereby reducing the power consumption of the phone to 1 watt or less. You can easily awaken a Cisco Unified IP Phone in Power Save Plus mode with the push of a single button. Alternatively, if you are in a call and a Cisco Unified IP Phone is scheduled to go into Power Save Plus mode, the action is automatically postponed. This flexibility allows your corporation to maximize energy savings without disrupting user productivity.
Q. What releases of Cisco IOS Software are required to run Cisco EnergyWise?
A. The current networking platforms that support Cisco EnergyWise include the Cisco Catalyst® 2960, 2960-S, 3560, 3560-E, 3560-X, 3750, 3750-E and 3750-X Series fixed switches, as well as the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series modular switch, the and the Cisco EtherSwitch® modules for Cisco ISRs. For fixed series switches and Cisco EtherSwitch modules, customers must upgrade to Cisco IOS® Software Release 12.2(53)SE1 or later with either the IP Base or IP Services feature set to use Cisco EnergyWise For Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switches, customers must upgrade to Cisco IOS Software Release 12.2(54)SG or later.
Cisco EnergyWise support was introduced on the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches in Cisco IOS Software Release 12.2(33)SXI4.
In addition to support on the Cisco EtherSwitch modules, the Cisco ISRs Generation 2 (G2) platforms support Cisco EnergyWise when using Cisco IOS Software Release 15.0(1)M2 or later.
In addition to Cisco EnergyWise, the Cisco ISR G2s contain many software and hardware innovations that allow them to use power more efficiently. For further information, see http://www.cisco.com/go/isrg2.
Q. How much does EnergyWise cost?
A. EnergyWise is a functionality implemented in Cisco IOS. There is no incremental charge for activating the EnergyWise service on any of the networking platforms that support Cisco EnergyWise.
Q. How to update my network to the Cisco IOS® Software release that supports EnergyWise?
A. Customer must be entitled to receive IOS software updates. Depending on the hardware platform in question, it could be free (e.g. Catalyst 2960-S, 3560-X, 3750-X,), or require a support contract like SmartNET (Catalyst 3750-E, Catalyst 4500, etc.).
Q. What exactly does EnergyWise do?
A. At a broad level EnergyWise helps users measure, monitor and regulate the power consumption of network attached devices. Here are some of its features
• EnergyWise can be used for a logical hierarchical representation of the network based on the concept of domains and roles.
• Categorize the power consumed by a device into various power levels.
• Allocate a logical rank to devices in the EnergyWise domain. The rank is based on the business value of the device to the infrastructure.
• Measure power consumed by the EnergyWise network at various levels of granularity. The measurement can happen on demand or periodically.
• Assess the changes to network power consumption based on policies defined by the user enabling him to decide if he would like to implement the policy.
• Can set the EnergyWise enabled devices to go into various power levels based on time of day, periodic or on demand policies.
Q. What is an EnergyWise Domain?
A. An EnergyWise domain is a logical grouping of EnergyWise enabled devices. These devices might include Switches, PoE powered devices like IP Phones and in future releases IT and building control equipment.
Q. Can a device exist across multiple domains?
A. No, Every Device has to be part of one logical domain.
Q. Can I get information from multiple domains?
A. If the management interface wishes to do so, it could act as a cross-domain information aggregation tool. EnergyWise at the switching level does not support cross domain information aggregation at the moment.
Q. How is EnergyWise made secure?
A. EnergyWise control commands are available via SNMP and CLI so these are secured by SNMP credentials and access to the console or CLI via SSH etc. The messages passed within the EnergyWise cloud are authenticated using a shared secret.
Q. Can other 3rd parties integrate with EnergyWise, and if so, how?
A. Yes, Cisco EnergyWise provides a software toolkit that consists of:
• The EnergyWise Management Application Programming Interface (MAPI): You can use the EnergyWise MAPI applications to monitor, control, and report power consumption information from the SDK agents or client applications in an EnergyWise domain.
• The EnergyWise endpoint software development kit (SDK): You can use the EnergyWise SDK to create clients that run on EnergyWise endpoints. The clients collect power consumption information from the endpoints and provide this information to EnergyWise MAPI applications. The SDK clients also provide the mechanism used by MAPI applications for controlling endpoint energy use.
Q. What choice of Cisco and 3rd party energy management platforms do I have to manage Cisco EnergyWise?
A. EnergyWise is built upon an eco-system of partners whom we compliment to develop a scalable and sustainable energy management system. The Cisco MAPI for Cisco EnergyWise will make it easy for industry partners to integrate Cisco EnergyWise support into existing management applications. Cisco continues to support the management of Cisco EnergyWise through Cisco's and third-party systems.
Q. How Does EnergyWise support VDI infrastructure?
A. EnergyWise already runs on the switching and routing platforms that support VDI inside the Enterprise, Campus and Edge. In the Data Center, EnergyWise runs on the Cat 4k and 6k platforms. For VDI endpoints, EnergyWise supports Cisco Zero Client devices (VXC 2100 and 2200) which are PoE powered.
Q. How Does EnergyWise support Universal Power over Ethernet?
A. From an EnergyWise perspective, Universal PoE is no different to PoE or PoE+. What is different is that UPoE will power a new range of endpoint devices which in turn can be managed with EnergyWise.
Q. How do I estimate savings made through EnergyWise?
A. Cisco EnergyWise Business Value calculator is available that takes into consideration a lot of scenarios to estimate the savings that can be realized. The calculator is available at http://www.cisco.com/go/energywise.
Q. Where can I get more information on Cisco EnergyWise?
