Reducing the costs of IT energy with Cisco Energy Management.

CEM allows you easily monitor the energy consumption of your global IT estate from a single, central location. After a baselining period during which it monitors the devices on your network (PC’s, printers, switches, routers, servers, IP phones, Wireless AP’s, etc, etc) you can identify which devices are being left powered on overnight that do not need to be. Once you have identified such devices (typically PC’s, IP Phones and Wireless AP’s), CEM can be configured to power them off overnight to save electricity and reduce your overall energy costs. Critical devices can be protected so they are not shut down inadvertently and users can abort the shutdown process if they are present at the time.

CEM can report on the energy being used by the devices it is monitoring and can display this and a great deal of other information including notional Co2 savings both in real time or in formatted reports. This allows you to monitor energy consumption minute by minute and device by device in a highly granular way with no impact to normal operations, no performance degradation and to easily identify high consumption systems. A side benefit is to allow you to identify “zombie” systems that are powered on but never actually used, Cisco themselves identified twelve racks of equipment in one of their data centres that had been powered on for two years and had been idle all that time.

Installation is very straightforward and can be carried out remotely, no software or agents need to be installed on the monitored devices and no configuration changes need to be made to them, the whole process can be carried out from a single, central location and it is possible to bring an entire global network of several thousand devices under management in a very short space of time, BMW deployed the system to manage over 100,000 devices in two days. The product can be run on a single Windows server (a cloud based option is available) and can scale to many hundreds of thousands of devices.

The product is licenced on a “per device” basis and costs are such that the typical payback period is under twelve months. Additionally, it is possible to purchase the software through Cisco's 0% finance offering to spread the cost over three years the aim of which is that the monthly saving in energy costs outweighs the monthly cost of the software. One of our customers who adopted the system are saving approximately £14,000pa over roughly 750 PC’s and other devices with a total installed cost of just over £10,000.

If the above is of interest please feel free to contact us for additional information. Alternatively, we can arrange a remote demonstration with a Cisco Product specialist to give you a more complete picture of the product and its capabilities.