Solutions & Technologies Accelerating Sustainable Outcomes

Investing in Innovation

Sustainability Drivers

Treat sustainability as a business driver - Successful organizations are shifting the sustainability conversation from risk and compliance to business transformation and growth. They feel the rising pressure from regulatory bodies and customer, investor, and employee demand—but even more, they see the value from energy savings, reduced business costs and enhanced brand reputation. Organizations with more mature sustainability practices are recognizing this as they shift their sustainability strategies from a focus on risk and compliance to driving business outcomes.

Cisco AI Readiness Report

The acceleration of artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing our world. In a global survey of private sector professionals involved in AI integration and/or deployment. Businesses need to be AI-ready in a way that is flexible, scalable, and provides industry-wide interoperability. Cisco’s AI Readiness Index measures the readiness of global companies to deploy AI solutions across six pillars: Strategy, Infrastructure, Data, Governance, Talent, Culture. Read the report to learn more.

Energy Management

Cisco is investing in its platforms and application programming interfaces (APIs) infrastructure to simplify energy management by transforming data into real-time energy visibility and insights. Cisco can help IT turn the network into a control plane to optimize energy consumption, minimize emissions, lower costs, and improve reporting capabilities.

Aligned to the Cisco Networking Cloud vision, Cisco is building a flexible API architecture for energy management that will be vendor and deployment-model agnostic for customers and partners to leverage and build their own bespoke solutions. This will support accurate measurement of energy consumption, energy efficiency and energy optimization for customers. It can also help IT build a blueprint to collaborate across their organization with open platforms to democratize access to data from the network, the physical space, assets, and people to help address sustainability challenges and opportunities.

Getting Started on the Sustainability Journey

Addressing sustainability as a business outcome matters more than ever. Organizations must reduce energy consumption today with long-term strategies to effectively manage tomorrow’s environmental impact. It’s both a sprint and a marathon.

Organizations need a new approach to advance their net zero goals. An overreliance on existing strategies, point solutions, and quick fixes can lead to organizations falling behind.

Internal and external challenges such as energy instability and demands from stakeholders, have driven business leaders to increase their focus on sustainability over recent years. More organizations are prioritizing sustainability and are asking for help. They may lack visibility into their energy consumption and GHG emissions.

Cisco has a well-established ecosystem of products, services, and partners to help organizations activate on rich data, enabled by energy efficient hardware, turning insights into actions. The holistic approach from Cisco can help reduce energy consumption and associated GHG emissions from technology and for the whole organization by leveraging technology.

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Transforming the Data Center

Optimizing Power Efficiency in Data Centers

Data Center Transformation to Sustainability

Energy Management

Modernization of infrastructure can help to improve energy and resource efficiency by deploying modular, next-generation technology and solutions designed and built with sustainability in mind. Optimize your site efficiency with real-time visibility of your energy consumption into your network with Nexus Dashboard, Cisco Intersight, and Cisco IoT and Meraki Sensors that can improve air quality, reduce energy consumption, and support sustainability initiatives with a simplified architecture for rapid deployments.

Migrate to Modern Hardware

Refresh to sustainable energy efficient infrastructure with Nexus 9800 series. Built using modular design, it is more energy efficient than the first generation of the Nexus 7000 series and 400G GX-based Nexus 9500 series.¹ The latest UCS-X series modular architecture is designed for sustainability, featuring several technology improvements and innovations. We estimate that upgrading to the Cisco UCS X-series from prior server generations can help reduce power consumption by up to 40-56% (based on various configurations), reduce the amount of hardware and raw materials, and reduce operating costs. ^{Sources: 1.}^{Cisco 2022 Purpose Report pg. 80}

Liquid Cooling in the Data Center

Liquid Cooling can handle the increasing density in data centers. It can significantly reduce energy consumption and uses less water than air cooling systems, which lowers operating expenses, produces less noise, ingests less contamination, and provides for greater system reliability.

Nexus Dashboard Insights provides detailed reports on power consumption, energy sources, and emission rates for your fabrics based on location so you can make more informed decisions on energy and power consumption, network planning, troubleshooting and more.

Integrations with leading power-management vendors Panduit and Vertiv deliver new sustainability insights to enable our customers to gain real-time and historical insights into the power consumption of the IT equipment in their data center and estimate the energy footprint of their operations.

Network energy consumption and cost
Carbon footprint of managed devices
Key sustainability metrics

Illustrative only - not actual customer data

Nexus Dashboard Powered by Intersight

Smart & Connected Buildings

Smart Buildings & Workspaces

Sustainable Design

Whether it is a building retrofit, tenant buildout or new construction, a key design criteria for building projects today is LEED certification and the reduction of carbon footprint. Cisco’s cross-architecture portfolio, with Cisco Catalyst portfolio as the backbone, can help accelerate the real estate digital transformation journey in support of today’s priorities: hybrid work, sustainability, digital real estate, and employee well-being.

Energy Networking

By connecting power and data, Cisco creates networks that can support sustainability and connect and distribute energy more simply and safely by deploying 90W Power over Ethernet (PoE) through the Cisco Catalyst portfolio. In place of conventional alternating current (AC) power, organizations can consolidate power and data networks, reducing embodied carbon from the use of steel conduits and copper wiring and improving energy conversion efficiency.

Space Management

Reduce total building power by enabling smart environment automation and unlocking occupancy insights to inform and automate space utilization with Cisco IoT and Cisco Spaces and Meraki sensors for power monitoring and management for distributed sites.

Enabling Hybrid Work

When you choose to meet on Webex, you choose to meet with sustainability in mind

Webex Control Hub Office Hours is a new feature that creates the ability to turn off ‘always on’ features such as digital signage and automatic wake-ups for a specified amount of time, extending the lifetime of screens and helping to save energy. We estimate that using office hours for 12 hours a day per year on a 40 Board Pro 75 that runs signage, can save up to 13.6 megawatts per year.¹

Webex Hot Desking through Control Hub allows organizations to optimize real estate with flexible seating options, freeing up meeting rooms for in-person and hybrid meetings.

Webex Room Bar is designed with 100% recyclable packaging design, a lighter form factor, minimizing plastics use, and reducing items in shipments².

Cisco’s Wi-Fi 6 and 6E APs provide seamless, secure wireless connections that enable remote collaboration, including bandwidth-intensive applications like Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) and video collaboration.

Sources: 1. Optimizing-your-Webex-devices.pdf 2. Life Cycle Analysis of Webex Desk Pro, slide 5, 2021 Commissioned Study by NORSUS / 3. Webex Room Bar Data Sheet, page 19

Webex Control Hub

Internet of the Future - Solutions for Service Providers

Internet for the Future

Service Providers, enterprises and governments are looking for operational efficiencies that can help reduce energy consumption, space, and maintenance cycles. Expanding on earlier Internet for the Future technology including new silicon, optics and software, Cisco’s Routed Optical Networking (RON) architecture combines high-density routers with pluggable optics to reduce network layers. Private Line Emulation (PLE) technology transports any legacy service over a converged packet infrastructure, allowing customers to help reduce energy consumption by retiring legacy time division multiplexing (TDM) equipment.

Technology enablers for RON include:

800G line card for Cisco 8000 Series Routers: Powered by Silicon One, the new line card helps customers build denser networks with 83% space savings and cuts power use by 68% compared to the 400G solutions¹^Source:^{New Cisco 800G Innovations Help to Supercharge the Internet for the Future}
Co-packaged Optics: Cisco recently announced an innovative design for co-packaged optics around three pillars to lower power for Webscale data center customers: (1) Removal of a level of digital signal processors (DSPs) to save power by moving the optics close enough to the switch application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC); (2) Moving the lasers away from the high power ASIC to cooler locations within the system chassis; and (3) Using production-proven silicon photonics technology from Cisco.
Technology enablers for RON include: Scalable silicon and high-density routers; Pluggable coherent optics; multi-vendor automation

Industry Solutions

Industry VR Experiences

Transforming Industry Solutions

Electric Utilities: Across the globe, utilities are digitizing their grids to accelerate the reliable delivery of clean energy by securely connecting and monitoring wind and solar farms, utility substations, grid energy storage, and electric vehicle (EV) charging stations with Cisco’s industrial networking, Cisco IoT and security portfolios¹ ^Source:^{Cisco Website: IoT Digital Utilities}

Transportation: From roadway infrastructure and traffic management operations to EV charging infrastructure and environmental monitoring, Cisco can help securely connect and scale digital infrastructure. Cisco IoT offers solutions for digitizing roadways by connecting cameras, traffic lights, and more to help better manage traffic, reduce congestion, and reduce carbon emissions.

Workforce Operations: Support sustainability and build a smart workplace environment for optimized communication and collaboration while improving employee productivity and asset utilization. Facilitate employee programs for rich collaboration and secure virtual work experiences supporting sustainability.

Manufacturing: Cisco IoT helps manufacturing customers increase production efficiency and better manage their power usage. Gain visibility and insights, stop manual troubleshooting, and reduce time spent on issues with wireless solutions that are highly secure, scalable, easy to manage, and support sustainability.

Empower Your Sustainability Journey With CX

Leverage technology to support sustainability and help simplify delivery of outcomes that align with your business and IT goals—no matter where you are on your journey. CX has a great vantage point into understanding how to address our products’ lifecycles. In a circular economy, we maintain assets at their highest and best use for as long as possible. Instead of being thrown away, products are optimized to facilitate return, remanufacture, and recycle. Dive into the CX Sustainability Customer Value Deck to discover how we are actively fulfilling this commitment through Cisco Lifecycle Services and customized assessments!

“Sustainability is a key component of our approach at Enel. I am proud to lead a team that supports the renewable energy transition not only for our customers, but also the countries they operate in.”

Victor Prieto, Head of Network Delivery at Enel Group