BT is offering enterprise customers a granular view of electricity consumption and carbon emissions associated with their individual compute workloads and AI applications. The UK firm has expanded its so-called Carbon Network Dashboard to provide customers with a view of how digital transformation drives is impacting their environmental footprints, and to give them the data to optimise their data-centre and network infrastructure to "keep a lid on AI carbon emissions". Invariably, the focus for the dashboard app is on AI, and its drain on compute and power resources.
BT said in a statement: "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 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 firm's dashboard facility already offers a ("near real-time") view of how much electricity a customer's network and data-centre infrastructure is using. Its new analytics function, part of a new NetFlow plug-in, ties consumption data to traffic patterns from individual apps, including those using AI. BT said it can use this to "help customers adapt, either by changing network design, capacity and management or [by] optimising applications and AI workloads". It can also recommend and develop distributed architectures, to make use of closer edge-based data processing.
BT said it is working to enable identification of traffic going to co-location or public cloud services, and to optimise usage of distributed compute resources, including for additional capacity as AI workloads develop. The dashboard now incorporates electricity consumption data from a wider range of equipment and devices, including in local and wide-area networks (LANs and WANs, and also software-defined WANs; SD-WANs). Its optimisation tools now include builder integration (V-App IoT) for energy management of wireless access points, zero-touch automation to enable/disable power over ethernet (PoE) ports, and refresh recommendations for end-of-life devices.
Sarwar Khan, sustainability director at BT Business, said: "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. 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."