The largest rack systems today, which have 98 blades in seven chassis, can consume as much as 24 kilowatts of power. As chips improve and densities increase, servers consuming 35 kilowatts or more aren't far off, said analysts and data center consultants at the conference.

"I see the [energy] problems growing," said Peter Gross, CEO and chief technology officer at New York-based services firm EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc.

Mike Bell, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., said there is huge demand for solutions to the power problem, and he expects more products to emerge as more vendors respond. "Where there is huge demand, there is innovation," said Bell.

One of Sun's T1 server beta testers is Fiducia IT AG, an IT provider in Germany for 900 banks that runs about 20 million transactions per day through its Java-based systems. Fiducia intends to soon start upgrading to the new chip, according to Matthias Schorer, Fiducia's technical chief architect.

Fiducia has 800 UltraSparc-based Sun Fire v440 systems. Schorer said his firm has tested the T1 against those systems and found that it can replace at least four of the v440 servers with one T1-powered server because of its ability to handle additional loads.