Networking hardware maker Cisco unveiled its new data center in Allen, Texas this week, a facility that will support the company’s internal private cloud efforts, and its IT as a service offering, as well as serving as a showcase for the company’s own data center technology.

According to the announcement, the facility will deliver IT services like video, mobility, security and collaboration to Cisco employees, customers, partners and other constituents. Cisco says the new facility combines top environmentally friendly design techniques with “green” approaches to power and cooling, and an architecture optimized for virtualization and cloud computing.

The new data center is paired with a second facility in Richardson, Texas, forming what the company calls a Metro Virtual Data Center – the two facilities form a virtualized IT services cloud, while serving as backup sites for each other.

Cisco says it plans to consolidate its data centers around the world into three pairs of MVDC facilities, which will serve as the back-end to Cisco’s private cloud offering, Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services.

"Through use of our own technology, virtualization, and cloud computing, Cisco has built a highly productive and energy-efficient data center," said John Manville vice president of IT at Cisco, quoted in the press release. "In the future, I believe the IT industry will be able to measure energy usage against the productivity of the data center, helping us to determine business value delivered against resources consumed. That is where virtualization and cloud computing excel.  Cloud computing has garnered a lot of attention for its efficiency and cost savings, but it also can have a highly positive impact on reducing energy consumption."

The facility was designed to achieve a power usage efficiency metric of 1.35, says Cisco, using a range of green data center technologies and design techniques that includes rotary flywheels in the UPS room (rather than hundreds of batteries), air-side economizer cooling using outside air, a lagoon to capture rainwater for feeding on-site plants, rooftop solar cells to power the office space.

Cisco has submitted the facility for LEED Gold certification. It is expected to get it too.

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