Those darn servers consume more power and require more cooling with each successive generation, and now you’re either out of power, unable to cool it, or can’t run anymore network drops. What now? While those with fat wallets like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft can plunk down millions and just build a new data center, most of us don’t have such luxury.

Three approaches are paying big dividends for enterprises today:

— Consolidation via modernization – replacing lots of low performance older servers and storage with fewer new high performance devices

— Consolidation via virtualization – combining low utilization workloads onto the same server

See our research on this subject:

*Server Virtualization Adoption By Industry

*Pragmatic Approaches To Server Virtualization

*Storage Virtualization Emerges . . . Slowly

— Data center reconfiguration – reorganizing the data center to more efficiently utilize available power, cooling and network resources.

*Power And Cooling Heat Up The Data Center

What’s working for you? What isn’t living up to expectations? What gotchas have you encountered? We want to know. Leave a comment here or tell us your story by e-mailing me at jstaten@forrester.com.

James Staten

Principal Analyst