I have had many a conversation with managers at small-ish (or REALLY small) companies, who insist that they can’t address some of the energy efficiency practices that I write about because they are leasing real estate and don’t control overall management of their electricity consumption. I think that excuse is becoming thinner with each passing day.
Submetering technologies have been around for quite some time and it seems as if interest in them is growing. Consider this piece I wrote over on my SmartPlanet blog: real estate managers at software developer Adobe point to submeters (up to 30 of them) in their Seattle office building as one key to a serious energy consumption reduction. By the way, the company doesn’t own that building.
If this all sounds rather intimidating to you, then maybe you want to start in your data center? This week, one of the players in the energy management and monitoring space, Modius, announced an update to its OpenData software (version 3.5) that will enable enterprise data center managers to create reports of energy consumption in a much more granular way than before.
The tool allow reporting by groups of devices, including racks, rows or zones. So, you could present departments or divisions with electricity bills that exactly reflect their usage. That’s an eye-opener, isn’t it?
Said Modius Chief Scientist Jay Hartley:
“This release is a major step forward in achieving higher levels of data center operational maturity. Our new features provide facility managers with custom views of actionable data from diverse equipment sources. Reports can reflect operational perspectives like zones or racks or business perspectives like external customers or internal cost centers.”
Can your data center submeter electricity usage in the same way? Maybe it is time to ask that question.
