A Good Idea Is Worth a Million Pounds of Emissions

"If our products are more energy efficient for us, they're also more energy efficient for our customers."

Nayeem Sheikh, Energy Manager, Cisco

The amount of energy consumed by our products over their lifecycles represents one of the ways in which Cisco has an impact on the environment.

An important challenge for Cisco is to reduce the power consumption of our products while continuing to meet customer demand for reliability and more processing power. Because networking equipment must operate continuously, standby mode cannot be used to save energy. Therefore, we focus on improving our products' performance while maintaining or reducing their energy consumption. We do this by developing new technologies and integrating energy efficiency into the design process.

Efforts to incorporate energy-efficient design criteria include innovations such as incorporating a thermo-management circuit to the board design. The circuit operates the cooling subsystem more efficiently by activating controls only as needed, reducing power demand.

Tests of core products such as routers have shown an improvement in the amount of data they can process per unit of energy consumed. To improve the measurement of performance of our products, Cisco is developing standardized energy-efficiency metrics. This will help us establish benchmarks, and enable customers to compare and select products according to their energy efficiency.

Case Study: Improving Energy Efficiency of Cisco Routers

Two of our core product lines are the Cisco 2600, 2700, and 2800 series routers, and the Cisco 3600, 3700, and 3800 series routers. Routers are devices that transfer data between networks.

The 2600-2800 series routers are used by small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). There are more than two million in use worldwide. The 3600-3800 series routers are used by enterprise companies and small Internet service providers (ISPs).

The main components of a router include the power supply, chassis, processor units, operating systems and circuit boards, and a fan system to keep the processor cool.

Cisco has introduced several innovations to improve router energy efficiency. These include new chips that process more data using less energy; components that consume less power; consolidation of several components into a single, more efficient unit; and standardizing components to the same voltage, which results in fewer energy-using transformers required.

Tests of new models have shown a marked improvement in the energy efficiency of these products. We measure energy efficiency by calculating the ratio between energy consumption and the amount of data transferred per second. The performance of new models of 2600-2800 series routers has improved by 135 percent since introduction of the product line in 1995. In the same period, energy efficiency of the 3600-3800 product line has improved by 233 percent.