Over the past six months, Hamann has been gradually rolling out automated shutdown technology from Persystent Technology Corp. in Tampa, Fla. His plan is to have the technology on 3,500 PCs by year's end.

And last week, Hamann began installing electric meters in his data center to learn how much it contributes to the college's annual $1.5 million energy bill. Once he knows that, he intends to go to his server vendor, Dell Inc., to see what it can do help him cut power usage. Reducing power costs "is what the college needs," he said.

IT managers are turning more attention to the cost of power as servers become more powerful and local utilities raise rates. According to Framingham, Mass.-based market research company IDC, the amount of money that users will spend worldwide on power and cooling servers will almost double from $26 billion last year to more than $44 billion by 2010.

But IT managers can't control what they can't easily measure, especially when it comes to vendor claims on server energy efficiency. With that issue in mind, a measurement protocol is being developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and major IT vendors, with a final draft protocol for standardized testing of energy use due out by next week.

Server energy efficiency is very important to Paul Froutan, vice president of research and development at Rackspace Ltd., a managed hosting provider in San Antonio. Froutan conducts his own tests on server energy use and estimates that there may be as much as a 30 percent variation among similar server products in performance and energy use.