That's according to Victor Teo, NCS's leading consultant who was addressing a CIO seminar about Green IT, put on by IT and communications engineering solutions provider NCS and information storage and security firm EMC, at Singapore's Laguna National Golf & Country club.

Teo told the seminar that one full rack of blade servers (about 20 -- 25 physical servers) used enough electricity to satisfy the peak demand of 30 residential homes.

"Organizations with more than 200 servers are currently wasting between US$500,000 and US$1.5 million in under utilized computer servers," Teo said. "The planning cycle for physical to virtual migration generally takes a month, and can be implemented over a weekend."

Expensive power and cooling

Sal Fernando, EMC's chief technical architect for the Asia Pacific and Japan, told the seminar that for every one dollar of technology purchased, enterprises need to pay 50 cents for power and cooling.