At last I can talk about it!  Sometimes internal announcements can lead to a great deal of frustration when something great has been done and you can’t tell anybody!  -> “I can’t tell anybody about this for how long!”……

Much has been made of the energy drawn by ICT systems and a push has been made by most vendors to make their hardware as efficient as possible.  Let’s have a think about that though – how much of a difference are vendors making by focusing on making their power supplies/power draw the most efficient on the market? and, to focus on networking –> what percentage of the total energy draw of a company’s ICT estate do network devices actually consume?  I’m going to hazard a very scientific guess of “not much”… queue “Cisco Energywise”…

Cisco EnergyWise has just been unveiled at Cisco Networkers 2009.  It can be installed on any Cisco Catalyst switch to allow users to measure and control the energy consumption of devices such as IP phones, PCs/laptops, and access points.  Devices that are typically not IP enabled now will be monitored/managed in the future – lights, heating/cooling etc.  Now that increases the scope of control a great deal further than routers and switches!

I’m not going to blast you with technical information now; I think it’s more important to understand the benefits of the approach being taken by Cisco before getting swamped in config commands etc, so please find out more here, here, and here and I’ll look to go into more tech detail in the future…