Cisco has introduced energy management capabilities to its Nexus Dashboard in a move to help customers reduce the carbon impact of powering complex cloud and data center networks.

Since Cisco sits at "the intersection of sustainability and technology," the vendor is uniquely positioned to help its customers make informed decisions about IT sustainability, according to Denise Lee, VP of Cisco's engineering sustainability office. And sustainability seems to be prioritized all the way up to the top. CEO Chuck Robbins noted in a blog post that "operating sustainably and equitably is the only way to do business."

Before this year's Cisco Live event, the Nexus Dashboard provided visibility for monitoring, optimizing and securing environments across the data center networking infrastructure. By integrating features from the vendor's API partners Panduit and Vertiv, the dashboard now offers visibility into the energy consumption of cloud and data center network components.

Specifically, the dashboard will provide real-time and historical insights into power consumption, total cost and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with operating Cisco's Nexus switches. The dashboard also monitors the ambient temperature of data centers to address cooling efficiency.

Notably, the dashboard offers customers "an understanding of their [overall] data center power consumption rather than just Cisco switches," Usha Andra, product marketing leader for the data center networking and provider connectivity group, told SDxCentral.

A majority of Cisco customers use more than just Cisco hardware in their data center environments, and they can connect non-Cisco IT equipment to Panduit or Vertiv through the dashboard's APIs to provide a full picture of network energy use.

With "the ability to onboard Panduit and Vertiv PDUs [power distribution units] into Nexus Dashboard, instead of just reporting energy metrics from Cisco Nexus switches, we will also be able to report the power utilization coming out of Panduit and Vertiv PDUs at a per-circuit level or per-outlet level," Andra added.

Cisco touts future plans to improve the dashboard by including carbon emissions forecasts and emissions savings recommendations for Nexus switches, like configuration changes that reduce the amount of power Nexus switches require. The dashboard will also add the ability for customers "to forecast if they were to replace their equipment with newer-generation equipment, how much greener could they be, how much would it lower their footprint by doing a refresh with more efficient networking equipment," and provide "recommendations of port usage, turning ASICS on and off, etc.," Andra said.

The networking vendor also plans to add energy management insights to Cisco's Intersight IT operations platform, including visibility into energy use of compute nodes, servers, blades, racks, fabric interconnects and chassis.

"Across Cisco’s portfolio, we are designing solutions to bring energy management and circularity to smarter buildings, more sustainable data centers and a more sustainable internet for the future," Lee added.