Whitepaper: 3 Steps to Calculate Total Enterprise IT Energy Consumption Using DCIM

Measuring, reporting, and managing a company’s sustainability performance is starting to drive employee retention, corporate reputation, and contribute to business success. Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) will report environmental sustainability metrics for the entire enterprise. However, to track progress against the enterprise’s goals and determine where inefficiencies are and improvements can be made, CSOs will need each department or function in the organization to provide more granularity in their measurement of sustainability metrics. IT is one important department where there is much interest in understanding energy consumption and, ultimately, its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

We recommend that CIOs who are beginning their sustainability journey start with measuring just one metric: total energy consumption. This fundamental metric shows the direct impact of IT operations and is used by CSOs to calculate GHG emissions. Energy consumption is also good to start with because the data sources and collection tools are readily available today, and in many cases, are likely already in use by your IT operations team.

This paper provides a simple framework to measure and track IT energy consumption across the entire enterprise IT portfolio. There are three steps: Step 1: Assess the coverage of your IT estate Step 2: Determine metric data sources and deploy metering and software Step 3: Use data center infrastructure management (DCIM) to aggregate data and report total energy consumption