BT today announced it has expanded its Carbon Network Dashboard to give business customers visibility of electricity consumption and carbon emissions at an individual workload and application level. The insight will allow them to optimise their data-centre and network infrastructure to manage emissions as they adopt AI applications at scale.

AI can have significantly different impacts on networks and data-centres than other application types. It can cause sharp, unpredictable increases in bandwidth demand, which in turn cause spikes in power use by infrastructure traditionally designed for predictable workloads. If spikes in demand overload individual network devices or servers, this will not only impact performance but cause them to overheat, wasting electricity. This creates additional challenges for customers aiming to reduce emissions.

The Carbon Network Dashboard already offers a single, end-to-end, near real-time view of how much electricity a customer’s network and data-centre infrastructure is using. It can now tie this consumption to traffic patterns caused by individual applications, including AI.

As part of its sustainable network design and refresh service, BT can use this insight to help customers adapt, either by changing network design, capacity and management or optimising applications and AI workloads. BT can also help customers develop distributed architectures, which bring components of AI closer to users, devices and machines. 

The capabilities are part of the latest NetFlow plug-in for the Carbon Network Dashboard. In future, the Dashboard will be able to identify traffic going to colocation or public cloud services and prioritise what to focus on for optimisation, including re-designing for extra or flexible capacity. This will ensure network devices are running within their design limits, efficiently and with flexibility to accommodate growth of AI workloads.

In addition, the Dashboard now incorporates electricity consumption data from a wider range of world-leading network equipment vendors and types of devices. This includes SD-WAN equipment, servers and WAN and LAN devices.

The Dashboard’s energy optimisation tools have also been expanded. They now include: V-App IoT builder integration for energy management of wireless access points; zero-touch automation to enable/disable power over ethernet (PoE) ports when not in use for energy management and carbon savings; and sustainable device refresh recommendations for end-of-life devices.

“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, Business, 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.”

ENDS

BT today announced new digital tools to help multinational customers measure and optimise the carbon impact of running applications and cloud workloads across their network.

While the Carbon Network Dashboard gives a real-time view of power consumption, the Digital Carbon Calculator helps customers estimate their network’s carbon footprint.

The Dashboard uses machine learning to detect and predict anomalies based on historic usage. This includes which network devices are consuming the most power. Customers can also forecast total energy use based on their network inventory and historic utilisation.

To help understand how electricity consumption translates into carbon emissions, the Dashboard includes data from regional power grids showing their carbon intensity. In future, it will draw on wider real-time information sources such as renewable energy on national grids and in datacentres.

The Calculator scans the customer’s network inventory to estimate its carbon footprint and can track how this responds to changes and upgrades over time. It includes lifecycle management, highlighting devices at the end of service to prioritise for replacement. Customers can also choose to use the calculator by uploading an inventory of their network equipment for analysis.

The launch of the new tools will be extended to BT’s UK enterprise customers in the near future. It marks the latest step in the company’s delivery of its manifesto pledge to help customers avoid 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. According to Gartner, Scope 3 emissions — those generated across an organisation from its supply chain through to product or service delivery — are the most challenging to measure yet can account for over 95 per cent of the total.

Sarwar Khan, head of digital sustainability, Global, BT said: “With customers hosting more of their applications across multiple clouds, networks are now increasingly vital for all elements of business performance, including carbon impact. Our new tools empower customers to reduce their Scope 3 emissions by optimising their network or scheduling digital workloads when renewable energy is available, helping them to achieve their net zero goals.”