(Length: 17 pages)

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

After a brief day in the sun in the late '90s, concerns about power and cooling as critical limitations in the enterprise data center and corporate IT strategy faded into obscurity along with the dot-com economy. Over the past two years, however, as energy prices have soared and servers have grown denser and hotter, power and cooling have once again become critical issues. Improving energy efficiency and solving the problems generated by increasingly dense server form factors is a community effort that requires contributions from semiconductor, system, software, and data center operation vendors. Vendors — of whom some lead the charge and others are being dragged along — have collectively realized that there is money in efficiency; they will vie for energy-conscious customers over the next 24 months. But users shouldn't wait for vendor products. You can take simple and effective steps today to both improve your overall operations and plan for future technology.