In years gone by, big bulky servers sat in roomy racks on a raised floor, with central air-conditioning keeping temperatures under control. But now, with blade-servers in high-density environments and ever-increasing demands for mission-critical 24x7x365 operation, IT professionals find themselves under the gun.

The "E-word": efficiency

"Most organizations now regard their IT infrastructure as the backbone of their business operations, said Yau Kan, senior VP, Fujitsu Hong Kong. "However, CIOs and their IT teams constantly have to balance their requirements for higher efficiency and better performance with the realities of tighter budgets."

Yau said consolidation is a powerful tool for enterprises to unlock value from their IT infrastructure. "In Hong Kong, we see a strong push to centralize servers and consolidate datacenters from our customers: to pull servers and persistent data storage out of branch offices and centralize them in a small number of corporate datacenters," he said. "IT managers, especially in Hong Kong, are investing more in space-saving infrastructure advances such as blade servers in to maximize computational power within the datacenters."

Power consumption is a major concern among Hong Kong customers, said Felix See, general manager of Technology Solutions Group, HP Hong Kong. "More servers are multi-core now," he said, "so they generate a lot of heat, and this is a growing problem." See said that power demands can lead to overheated servers, burned-out fuses, and even batteries catching fire.