It's one of several ways that Intel is working with other vendors to design more power-efficient systems for companies offering cloud computing services, Intel General Manager Jason Waxman told reporters at a joint briefing with EMC. The chip maker also announced a program with software vendors to test software management stacks for use in large, scale-out data centers.

is a hardware and software platform used mainly by service providers to manage multi-petabyte storage systems that can be spread across several data centers. AT&T's pay-as-you-go Synaptic hosting service is based on Atmos, for example, according to EMC.

Power management is the top concern for EMC's customers, said Michael Feinberg, senior vice president with EMC's cloud infrastructure group. Besides the cost per megawatt, many customers are being constrained by the power capacity of their data centers, he said.

EMC can do some things to make Atmos more power-efficient, such as turning off disks when they are not in use. "But we do not right now have the ability to manage power at the server level," Feinberg said.

EMC hopes to release a version of Atmos in the second half of next year that will be able to do just that, using Intel power management tools that are supported by its 5500-series Nehalem processors.