The amount of greenhouse-gas emissions directly associated with Cisco’s operations have increased by about 7,000 tons, according to the company’s latest corporate sustainability report. The amount of indirect emissions, or emissions generated by using purchased electricity, went up about 13,600 tons in fiscal year 2011.

By Cisco’s own estimates, its operations directly emitted about 60,000 tons of greenhouse gases. Indirect emissions for the year totalled about 611,000 tons.

One of the cornerstones of Cisco’s emission-reducing efforts is its new data center in Allen, Texas – the first building the company designed specifically to house a data center instead of retrofitting an existing structure. The project was part of an overall consolidation program for the company’s data center fleet.

Some of the Allen facility’s energy saving features include flywheel-based UPS systems, airside economization and rain-water reuse. The company says the data center was designed to achieve a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.35.

The Allen data center and another Cisco data center near Raleigh, North Carolina, each have 100kW photovoltaic arrays installed on site. These are pilot installations and the company said it would use the experience gained from having them “to assess wider implementation.”

One of the performance indicators for reducing the impact of its data centers on the environment Cisco uses is the amount of CO2 emitted as a result of using an x-amount of energy.

After rising continually for at least four years, the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions associated with every 1kWh used by the company’s data centers started to go down last year. The company reported 435.4 grams of CO2 emitted per 1kWh used by data centers for fiscal year 2010. Emissions per 1kWh went down to 435 grams of CO2 per kWh.

As an example of its products and services enabling energy savings, Cisco brought its participation in a program for revitalizing healthcare infrastructure in China’s Sichuan Province following the deadly earthquake that shook the region in May 2008, taking tens of thousands of lives.

Part of Cisco’s Connecting Sichuan Initiative was equipping six regional cloud-based healthcare data centers to connect rural clinics with full-service hospitals and the government health department. According to Cisco, the regional data centers enabled claims processing for nearly 60m medical insurance records and helped manage electronic health records for more than 400,000 people.

Besides enabling emission reductions by modernizing infrastructure with high-tech solutions, the company is working to make its technology more energy efficient as well. One example is Cisco’s development of its own Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).

 An ASIC is a chip designed specifically for one application in one product, and is one of the biggest energy hogs among components on a motherboard.

While it uses OEM-designed ASICs in its low-cost high-volume products, Cisco uses its own ASICs in its enterprise and data center switches (Nexus and Catalyst). The company is focusing development efforts on multiple ways to optimize ASIC energy use.