In just four short years, Cisco plans to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent. John Chambers announced during Cisco Live! that the cuts will be made possible by across the board improvements, from internal operations and its own products to, of course, their own IT operations and how employees travel (or don't).

In a company press release, they outlined just how much of a reduction is in store.

In calendar year 2007, Cisco's gross GHG footprint was 832,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalents (CO2e). This footprint includes emissions from Cisco's globally owned and leased facilities, vehicles and its airline travel. Based upon the EPA Climate Leaders protocol, this figure becomes net 724,000 metric tons of CO2e. With today's announcement, Cisco aims to reduce its GHG emissions by 2012 to a net footprint of 543,000 metric tons of CO2e.

One way they plan to accomplish this is power management, which thanks to the likes of IBM and others, has sparked whole new ways of monitoring and tweaking data centers to make sure that no watt is wasted. Another is a favorite of mine: teleconferencing.

In its labs and data centers, which account for a significant percentage of Cisco's energy use, the company will deploy a variety of techniques. These include taking detailed measurements of energy flows, utilizing more efficient lab equipment, using the "virtual network" to store data, adding smart power-distribution units that automatically shut down machines not in use, and upgrading building mechanical and electrical systems. Cisco will also increase its use of collaboration technologies such as Cisco TelePresence and the Cisco WebEx suite of tools to reduce the need for business travel, which accounts for 27 percent of Cisco's GHG footprint.

For customers, Cisco launched the public beta of Efficiency Assurance Program (EAP) portal (link is on the right hand side), which is flush with Flash-based videos and tutorials to get companies started on their own CO2 reduction programs.

In related news, Cisco announced new software and services centered around virtualization. The new stuff, flying under the Cisco Data Center 3.0 banner, is as follows:

• Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) software release 4.1, offering virtualized application hosting services, greater application acceleration and video delivery for the branch office;
• Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) software release 3.1 for the ACE 4710 application switch, offering up to 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput and up to 2 Gbps of compression capability, and multimedia readiness on a virtualized platform;
• Cisco VFrame Data Center software release 1.2, offering end-to-end infrastructure provisioning with Cisco ACE and VMware ESX;
• New Cisco Data Center 3.0 professional programs and services to better support customers with data center deployments.

Busy day. Thanks Dan!