The company is telling IT managers to be mindful and smart when addressing powering and cooling data centers during these tough economic times, Bozman said. According to an IDC survey in 2008, 21.8 percent of IT managers surveyed felt power and cooling as the top challenge facing data centers.

Many servers during the dot-com period were employed to fill Web capacity without keeping power and cooling in mind, Bozman said. Data centers at that time had a mix of large and small servers, while small servers dominate data centers today.

Dell also wants IT managers to chuck old gear that is least energy efficient, and move workloads to new energy-efficient servers capable of virtualization, Bozman said.

Since Michael Dell came back to lead the company in 2007, it has taken a different approach to engineering technologies for enterprise servers and storage products, Dell's Becker said.

"The very first thing we asked as a trade-off was around energy efficiency because we knew...if we were going to deliver the most value to customers, it's going to be around the most effective use of energy. Doing that right saves them a bunch of money over low-acquisition costs even if it's a more expensive power supply," Becker said.