Sustainable Data Centers: Design and Development of the What-If Scenario Feature within Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights' Sustainability Report

Energy-hungry and heat-generating data center servers and switches draw up to 2 percent of all electricity in the United States alone. That is why, in recent years, an increasing number of forward-looking organizations have set as their top priorities the design of more sustainable data centers and the optimization of their network equipment energy usage. Cisco, alongside other prominent technology companies, has placed great emphasis on the topic of sustainability related to the data center environment, focusing in particular on the development of software components and web-based dashboards that provide users with full visibility into their data center sustainability metrics. One noteworthy solution is the new service within the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights, called Sustainability Report. The Sustainability Report's objective is to inform users about energy usage, costs, CO2 equivalent emissions, and power sources utilized by their networking devices. The main topic of this thesis is the design and development of a new feature for the Sustainability Report called What-If Scenario. The objective of this feature is the creation of a comparison report that informs the user about its improvement or worsening in terms of emissions and costs when the location of the data center is changed. Users might have two primary reasons for running the What-If Scenario report. First, they may be thinking of physically relocating an existing data center to a new location, primarily for security or political reasons. Second, they might be planning to build a new data center with characteristics similar to an existing one and want to use the comparison report to forecast changes in sustainability metrics for the new data center location. By providing users with insights into the environmental and financial implications of changing data center locations, this feature helps organizations make informed decisions that align with their sustainability goals.