Computer rooms are becoming too hot to handle. Data-hungry tasks such as video on demand, downloading music, exchanging photos, and maintaining Web sites require more and more power-hungry machines. Power and cooling costs for data centers have skyrocketed by more than 800 percent since 1996, with U.S. enterprise data centers predicted to spend twice as much on energy costs as on hardware over the next five years.
The heat generated from rooms full of servers is causing equipment to fail. Some organizations spend more money to keep their data centers cool than they spend to lease the property itself. It’s a vicious cycle, as companies must pay to power their servers, and then pay again to keep them cool and operational. Cooling a server requires roughly the same number of kilowatts of energy as running one. All this additional power consumption has a negative impact on the environment and as well as corporate operating costs.
Some of the world’s most prominent firms are tackling their power consumption issues with one eye toward saving the environment and the other toward saving dollars. Google and Microsoft are building data centers that take advantage of