Energy costs and infrastructure complexity are rising, right along with the pressure to go "green". These factors are contributing to higher operating costs-while computing requirements continue to grow unabated-which favor technologies that can rein in costs and simplify server management. Moreover, many IT organizations will opt for solutions that improve the cost-efficiency and performance of their existing systems.

Organizations striving for greater data center efficiency are evaluating options to achieve the following infrastructure goals: first, the transition to "greener" computing-companies are asking IT departments to dramatically raise data center energy efficiency and reduce power and cooling costs, and second, getting more from strategic technologies-the latest advances in server clustering, software parallelization and virtualization are creating more value to data centers, further lowering cost and increasing performance without "forklift" changes.

COOLING SOLUTIONS, POWERFUL PROCESSORS

Some IT facilities are beginning to run out of cooling capacity and power because air conditioning systems are maxed out and power distribution infrastructure is completely utilized. Combining hardware and software strategies, data center cooling solutions use various approaches such as optimizing airflow, scheduling server workloads off-peak and sharing power supplies between servers, with each providing incremental improvements.

One technique is to position server enclosures back-to-back, so exhaust air is carried by a dedicated channel to the cooling units. Since newly cooled air and hot exhaust air never mix, the cold air remains effective as it enters the enclosures. Using similar innovative methods, HP's Thermal Zone Mapping and Dynamic Smart Cooling solution can decrease energy costs by up to 45 percent by delivering cooling where and when it is needed the most.

Responding to pressures to improve performance per watt, CPU vendors have turned to multicore processor architecture. By running more cores at lower voltage and frequency, these processors are delivering greater computing performance, within a similar thermal envelope, than their predecessors. Launched in mid-2006, the Dual-Core Intel Itanium processor has twice the performance of previous, single-core Itanium processors, yet consumes 20 percent less power.