Yau quoted Gartner VP and analyst Steve Prentice as saying: "financial and environmental pressures, compounded by legislative changes and increasing consumer awareness, are combining to force IT vendors and CIOs to take a closer look at the impact 'green' will have on their business. The IT industry must now look beyond the current power issue and pay greater attention to broader issues, such as limiting carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, using materials from renewable resources, recycling materials and re-using heat from datacenters." Yau said his firm also recognizes that environmental protection is a vitally important business issue, and its servers are designed for lower power consumption and reduction of heat generation.

"Distributed server farms today generate as much as 3,800 watts per square foot, compared to 250 watts in 1992," said Desmond Yuen, executive of IBM Systems and Technology Group, IBM China/Hong Kong. Yuen added that "with thousands of dollars of cooling capacity needed for each server-assuming 1,000 distributed servers producing 400 watts each-the electricity bill could hit more than US$35,000 per month alone."

"A Gartner poll of 180 datacenter managers at the beginning of the year showed cooling was the #1 concern," said Hannaford from APC. "But right now the emphasis is more on efficiency."

Hannaford explained that energy costs have increased as server-room density increases, and along with the added power comes added heat, which must be dissipated in a controlled fashion. "Most hardware failures occur in the top-third of the server rack," he said, "because that's where the heat concentrates." To help combat this problem, APC issues products like vertical cooling coils, which can be retrofitted to racks from other manufacturers.

Demands in 2006