The federal-government-wide data center consolidation initiative is chugging along in the US, but apparently, most government IT decision makers do not have any way to track the progress they're making.

According to results of a new survey conducted by MeriTalk, which tracks the federal-government technology sector, hardly one in four federal tech officials can track the savings their data center consolidation initiatives are generating. Because they cannot quantify the savings, they cannot reinvest them.

Another problem is that less than half of survey respondents said they believed their IT departments had adequate incentives to pursue energy savings.

US senator Tom Carper (D-Del.), said the report should be a "warning light" for officials interested in the consolidation initiative.

"There's  little knowledge about how much  and how efficiently  Federal data centers are using energy," he said in a statement. "While we are trying to cut the fat from our data center budgets, it seems we can't even see over our belts to the number on the scale."

Carper is chairman of the senate subcommittee on homeland security and governmental affairs. The subcommittee is planning to review progress of the consolidation efficiency "in the coming weeks", he said.

The report ÔÇô titled Measure to Manage II: Consolidation Crash Course? ÔÇô was sponsored by the storage vendor NetApp. It was based on an in-person survey of 157 federal IT leaders.

Not only don't most IT leaders have a way to track efficiency gains, most of them do not even know the average amount of electricity each rack in the data centers they oversee consumes: 67% of survey participants said that to MeriTalk.

Only 31% of respondents said they knew the average total load across their data centers. This is while 94% of data center operators in the private sector have this information, according to MeriTalk.

The report said 84% of federal agencies are currently working on data center consolidation. The government-wide consolidation initiative was spearheaded by the US government's CIO Vivek Kundra, who is planning to leave the role in August.

More than 800 federal-agency data centers have been identified for closure by 2015. Kundra announced in April that 137 of them would be closed before the end of 2011.

An earlier study by MeriTalk concluded that the federal data center consolidation initiative was an opportunity for the government to save about US$18.8bn a year.