Whose job is sustainability?

There are network admins who might have never seen the power bills of their network. “Power saving skills” is something which is not mentioned any network engineer’s job profile but does that mean it is not part of your job ? “Reducing carbon emission” is not mentioned in any of the software engineering job profile, but does that mean it is not part of your job.

The time has come when your fabulous idea or product could get rejected if it was not developed keeping sustainability in mind. And this is the main reason why all vendors are now trying to materialize the idea of sustainability in their product. In my view nothing is sufficient when we talk about saving our planet, and at the same time all efforts are counted.

Let’s see how some Cisco products are helping us with sustainability.

Nexus Cloud:

Nexus cloud is a cloud based operations and orchestration tool to manage data center. Now with this tool you can keep track of network energy utilization where you can see the power utilization of every transferred bit of data. You can compare the previous day utilization with current day. You can also figure out if some part of your data center is consuming higher than expected power. This is really handy and useful.

Webex Control hub:

Webex Control Hub is the central dashboard for all your Webex services and collaboration devices.In the recent CiscoLive Cisco has demonstrated the energy and carbon emission insights for their webex services and collaboration products. Similar to what nexus dashboard shows control hub can also show the overall power utilization and carbon emission metric for the same.

Sustainability in 800G portfolio

With up to 68% power savings, the 800G systems can help customers meet their sustainability goals.

• Assuming a single 800G system is in use 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, the potential energy savings over 400G systems would reduce GHG emissions by up to 215,838 CO2e per year.
• This amount of carbon savings is estimated to be equivalent to reducing carbon emissions from charging 40 million smartphones or burning 366,923 pounds of coal a year.
• Customers can also reuse common equipment when upgrading to 800G systems to help cut down on e-waste.

ref : Cisco newsroom

Return EOL(End of Life) products

Many OEM(Original equipment manufacturers) run programs to return the EOL products and in return they run some discount programs too. Please check with your OEM to return the out dated devices and get the credit like you do with your apple products.

The takeaway from this is to start looking for sustainability metric for your product purchases!!