"PUE, which is the total facility's power, divided by total IT equipment power, expressed in KwH [kilowatts per hour], was developed by the Green Grid, and has started to receive a lot of attention worldwide," McPherson said. "For example, a data centre PUE rating of 2.75 would be high, whereas a PUE of 1.4 would be very low."

"Taking a data centre from 2.75 to 1.4 PUE would amount to power savings of about US$2.7 million," he said, adding that Raritan's intelligent KVM solutions would help data centre managers with better power management.

"Virtualisation does bring about better efficiency and better cost containment, which is why this is the main approach being used by data centre managers," McPherson said. "However, there are various other actions that would maximise data centre utilisation, brought down to the level of even buying equipment within a holistic green architectural approach."

"A significant cost of the data centre is the actual IT equipment and not just the power to cool your data centre," he said. "Intelligent PDUs would allow you to see the load on every server."

"According to Frost & Sullivan's February 2010 study, the Asia Pacific data centre market will grow at a CAGR [compound annual growth rate] of 14.7 per cent in 2010 and 16.4 per cent in 2011, by which point its size will reach US$10.68 million, which makes power management an issue that will head the agenda in this sector," said McPherson.