Businesses have to find a sustainable approach to energy use, to cut costs in an uncertain economy, and to meet increasing environmental regulations.

One of the biggest drains on energy use for large enterprises is the data centre. According to recent research by analyst Frost and Sullivan (Green Data Centres – Emerging Trends and Developments” 2009) as much as 40 percent of a company’s total power requirements could be associated with data centre infrastructure. Faced with those kind of numbers, there is considerable pressure on IT departments to reduce the cost of their computing facilities.

Is consolidation the answer?

Consolidation is one approach that has been used successfully by organisations to cut their data centre real-estate. Technologies such as virtualisation and increasing adoption of blade servers are helping this process by packing more compute power in a smaller space, although sometimes that results in higher power density requirements depending upon the technologies deployed.

And while it may be true that IT departments are under pressure to cut back IT infrastructure, business processes are becoming ever-more reliant on more sophisticated compute platforms increasing an enterprise’s IT installation. From increasing use of video-conferencing to replace carbon-intensive travel, to face-to-face contact being subsumed by social networking, computing has never been more critical.