By Sonny Garrowitz

The introduction of Cisco System’s new “green” data Center in Allen, Texas, showcases a number of energy efficiency features and is outfitted with Cisco’s latest technologies for building cloud ready computing applications.

The data center is just north of another Cisco facility in Richardson, Texas. The two data centers will serve as “active active” mirrors of one another, providing instant failover in the case of an outage at either location. When data is updated at one of the data centers, the changes are instantly synchronized at the other facility.  

1. Extended unified fabric consolidation beyond the access point

2. Provides industry-leading convergence with "wire-once,” on-demand functionality

3. Addresses ultra-low latency workload requirements

4. Evolves the infrastructure to virtualized, highly secure, cloud-ready environments

Cisco has labeled this approach a Metro Virtual Data Center (MVDC). The company plans to consolidate its data centers into three pairs of MVDC production data centers worldwide, which will serve as the building blocks for Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services, the company’s in-house service cloud.

Using Cisco’s Unified Computing System the new center will support the consolidation effort and power Cisco’s in-house cloud. The facility features a holistic data center fabric including Nexus 7000 and 5000 Series switches, Nexus 1000V Virtual Switches,

MDS storage networking switches, Data Center Network Manager and NX-OS and a comprehensive Cisco data center portfolio. Underlying this is the claim that Cisco maintains where the unified fabric allowed it to save more than $1 million on cabling in the Allen facility

Below are some other notable features of the new Cisco data center:

1. The building was designed to withstand tornado winds up to 175 mph.- The UPS room (uninterruptable power supply) room in the 5 megawatt data center uses rotary flywheels, which require little energy to continue in motion and start the diesel generators in case of power loss.- The data center is cooled by an air-side economizer design, which reduces the need for mechanical chilling by using ambient fresh air when the outside temperature is low enough. Cisco calculates the facility can use filtered, outside un-chilled air 65 percent of the time, saving the company an expected $600,000 per year in cooling costs, while contributing to its corporate green goals.

2. Cisco also opted to forego a raised floor environment and use overhead cooling and cable management. The overhead cooling ducts drop air into each cold aisle, where it enters the servers and then is vented through a passive chimney system in the rear of each enclosure and into an overhead return plenum. That’s a change from the design in Richardson, which uses a 36-inch raised floor.

3. A lagoon captures rainwater to irrigate the indigenous, drought-resistant landscape plants.

4. Solar cells on the roof generate 100 kilowatts of power for the office spaces in the building.

5. Cisco has submitted the data center for Gold certification by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

6. Developed by the U.S. Green Board Council, LEED provides builders with a framework for measurable green building design, construction, operations, and maintenance solutions.

The design of the Allen data center is to achieve a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric of 1.35, or so Cisco says.
“Any Application in Any Location” According to John McCool, senior vice president, Data Center, Switching, and Services Group, Cisco… “Our new data center showcases Cisco’s innovation leadership and the data center architectural flexibility to deliver any application, in any location, and any scale in a secure and open manner.”

“As critical business assets, data centers today are undergoing rapid technology and architectural changes to meet and respond more rapidly to evolving business goals,” said Soni Jiandani, vice president, Server Access and Virtualization Group,

Cisco. “Innovative Cisco technologies like the Cisco Unified Computing System and Nexus product families are helping data centers transform into an agile and efficient networked environment that helps deliver information from any device to any content, anywhere, at any time.”

The new data center uses a solid floor and overhead cooling, instead of a raised floor design.

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