The larger and denser servers aren't going away, so how do companies change the economics of this? First, when buying equipment look not only at performance-per-dollar but look at performance-per-watt. Be sharper on buying. IT has to become conscious of this energy efficiency and put pressure on the manufacturers to be more energy aware. That's going to benefit everybody in the long term.

A second thing people can do is to kill dead servers -- servers that are still running but not actively doing anything.

Are dead servers really an issue? From 10 percent to 30 percent of the load in a data center is represented by servers that aren't doing anything. By turning off those servers, you can cut your energy consumption. The problem is there is no incentive -- there is risk -- but no incentive to turn those servers off.

The incentive to turn off unused servers off would seem apparent. These costs aren't linked. Who has to turn the server off? The data center manager. He's measured on availability; He's not measured on costs. You discover the 10 percent to 30 percent of dead servers whenever you move a data center because that's the only time you have to turn stuff off.

Other things that users can do: Consolidation of multiple servers onto a bigger platform, which will be more energy efficient. [And] IT can enable the power saving features that are now built into many new servers. For instance, a laptop comes set [to] not take advantage of power saving. If you are not using the laptop you turn off the screen, then you turn off the disk. The chip manufacturers, AMD and Intel, have these features built into their chip set, but the default is off. However, this again involves risks because someone has to make an evaluation that the server/chip will come back up to full speed fast enough to meet the service level agreement for the application. This requires the technical group to evaluate this.