Network Sustainability Analytics Overview

As networks scale up exponentially to meet the rising bandwidth demands, energy consumption also goes up at a similar pace, substantially increasing the power required to run the networks uninterrupted. This leads to higher operational costs for organizations and contributes to a growing global carbon footprint.

Traditional network infrastructures often operate on an “always-on” model, where devices and components continue to consume power even during periods of low or no utilization. This results in inefficient energy usage and unnecessary costs.

In addition, limited visibility into real-time energy consumption and emission data makes it difficult for organizations to effectively monitor usage, identify inefficiencies, and align with sustainability goals.

To address these challenges, Data Center Assurance provides the Network Sustainability Analytics feature that enables organizations to monitor, analyze, and optimize energy consumption across their network infrastructure.

The Sustainability dashboards offer granular visibility into energy consumption, allowing organizations to track how devices and their components use energy across the network. It also provides granular insights into utilization patterns, helping identify idle or underutilized resources that can be safely powered down without impacting network performance.

The solution also offers predictive analytics capabilities. Using historical data, it forecasts future energy requirements, associated costs, and expected greenhouse gas emissions. These insights support informed decision-making for capacity planning, budgeting, and infrastructure upgrades.

In addition, the feature provides energy optimization recommendations that help transition from an “always-on” model to an “on-demand” network model, where network devices or components can be turned off during low-usage periods to conserve energy.

To further support decision-making, the potential energy savings feature estimates the reduction in energy consumption, emissions, and costs that can be achieved by applying optimization recommendations. This allows organizations to evaluate the impact of optimization actions before applying them.

The solution also helps enhance operational reliability by enabling faster detection and troubleshooting of power and thermal related anomalies. It helps identify devices having abnormal power and temperature fluctuations and helps you resolve issues proactively before they impact network performance.

In summary, the Network Sustainability Analytics feature in Data Center Assurance provides these capabilities:

• Observability—Enables you to monitor energy consumption and thermal profile, track GHG emission and power cost, and identify the top power consuming sites and devices through easy-to-use tables, charts, and graphs.

• Insights on Sustainability Metrics—Provides utilization trends and AI-generated forecasts based on historical data for SBTi compliance reports.

• Energy Optimization Recommendations—Provides intelligent recommendations to shut down unused or underutilized resources on the network to optimize energy consumption without impacting network performance.

• Potential Energy Savings—Provides estimated savings in energy, cost, and emissions to help evaluate the optimization potential of your network infrastructure.

Accessing Network Sustainability Analytics

The Data Center Assurance dashboard provides a high-level view of the sustainability analytics for the entire organization.

To view detailed sustainability analytics for the organization, site, or device, click Sustainability from the main menu and select the organization, site, or device using the scope selector.

To ensure accurate sustainability analytics, configure sustainability settings on the Organization > Settings or Organization > Site Configuration page by specifying the power cost, carbon intensity, and the port threshold values.