BT's Carbon Dashboard update links AI traffic to real-time energy data

October 31, 2024 11:22 AM

Sarwar Khan, sustainability director for business at BT, with the Carbon Network Dashboard

BT has expanded its Carbon Network Dashboard, enhancing business customers' visibility into electricity consumption and carbon emissions for more effective infrastructure optimisation.

The updated solution offers real-time insights into power usage and emissions down to individual workloads and applications, helping operators identify emission-reducing opportunities for network-run applications like AI.

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BT’s Carbon Network Dashboard already offers an end-to-end view of how much electricity a customer’s network and data centre infrastructure is using.

In an update, the monitoring solution can now tie energy consumption to traffic patterns caused by individual applications, which BT suggested operators can use to transform their network’s design, capacity, and management or better optimise applications.

In an update to its energy optimisation tools, the dashboard now includes a V-App IoT builder integration for energy management of wireless access points, zero-touch automation to enable/disable power over ethernet (PoE) ports, and sustainable device refresh recommendations for end-of-life devices.

The dashboard now also incorporates electricity consumption data from a wider range of equipment vendors and types of devices, including SD-WAN equipment, servers and WAN and LAN devices.

Future updates will see the dashboard able to identify traffic going to colocation or public cloud services to help operators prioritise what to focus on for optimisation, including re-designing for extra or flexible capacity.

“AI has incredible potential but if not deployed thoughtfully could place unpredictable demands on customers’ digital infrastructure causing surges in electricity use and carbon emissions,” said Sarwar Khan, sustainability director for business at BT.

“BT is committed to helping customers innovate to achieve sustainable growth. With our Carbon Network Dashboard, we can help them adopt AI at scale while optimising their infrastructure to achieve their decarbonisation goals. It’s a great example of how BT has their back.”