Hewlett-Packard CIO Randall Mott's belief that "lights-out" data centers are possible was generally accepted by other IT managers at the Premier 100 conference, even if they disagreed over whether the necessary tools are far enough along to turn the lights out completely or just dim them.

As part of a plan to reduce the number of the company's data centers from about 85 worldwide to just six, Mott is setting out to prove that HP can develop a data center that can be operated entirely remotely. The plan, which Mott detailed at last week's conference, also includes consolidating more than 700 data marts into an enterprise data warehouse.

Mott said the consolidation moves are aimed at helping HP reduce its IT spending level from about 4 percent of annual revenue to 1.5 percent by the end of the company's 2008 or 2009 fiscal year.

A staffless data center is "absolutely conceivable," thanks to the availability of remote management tools, said Bob Jellison, vice president of information services at Papyrus Franchise Corp., a retailer in Fairfield, Calif.

But in Jellison's view, the long-term issue won't be so much lights-out operations but whether IT managers want to keep running their own data centers or hand them off to outsourcing vendors. "Do you really need to be running all those servers?" he asked.