That suits Marvin Wheeler just fine. The chief operations officer at Terremark Worldwide Inc. manages a 600,000-square-foot collocation facility designed to support 100 watts per square foot.

"There are two issues. One is power consumption, and the other is the ability to get all of that heat out. The cooling issues are the ones that generally become the limiting factor," he says.

With 24-inch floors and 20-foot-high ceilings, Wheeler has plenty of space to manage airflows. Terremark breaks floor space into zones, and airflows are increased or decreased as needed. The company's service-level agreements cover both power and environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity, and it is working to offer customers Web-based access to that information in real time.

Terremark's data center consumes about 6 megawatts of power, but a good portion of that goes to support dual-corded servers. Thanks to redundant power designs, "we have tied up twice as much power capacity for every server," Wheeler says.

Terremark hosts some 200 customers, and the equipment is distributed based on load. "We spread out everything. We use power and load as the determining factors," he says.