Linking Storage Telemetry to Corporate Sustainability Indicators: Development and Validation of an Auditable Measurement Framework
Abstract
Corporate sustainability reporting rarely connects storage-level telemetry with auditable environmental indicators that can be traced back to infrastructure activity. We developed a measurement framework linking provisioned capacity, active device count, utilisation, data movement, power estimates, and regional electricity carbon intensity to a set of storage sustainability indicators. The framework was validated using telemetry from 18 storage clusters over six months and compared with facility-level energy records where available. Estimated monthly energy consumption correlated strongly with metered values, with a mean absolute percentage error of 7.8%. Indicators based only on logical capacity showed poor correspondence with measured energy use, whereas hardware-state and utilisation variables substantially improved accuracy. The framework also generated traceable calculation records that allowed individual sustainability metrics to be reproduced from source telemetry. Data-quality assessment identified missing hardware-state data and inconsistent regional carbon factors as the main sources of uncertainty. An auditable telemetry-to-indicator pipeline can improve the credibility of infrastructure sustainability reporting, provided that assumptions, conversion factors, and uncertainty are retained alongside headline metrics.
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