“With blade servers and high-density servers, we’re packing more and more equipment into a smaller space, and that’s creating heat issues,” says John Welter, vice president of Valtus Imagery Services, a provider of computer-intensive graphical maps. In many cases, blades make it impossible to cool a fully populated room, meaning IT managers need a new datacenter even though the current one is only half full.

Compounding the power problem is the explosive growth of new IT services, as offices heed the call to use IT to automate sales, invoicing, and other business processes. That increases the number of servers in a typical datacenter. And, of course, no discussion of power would be complete without mentioning the price of oil, which has tripled since 2002.

“It’s kind of the perfect storm of IT power consumption,” Murphy says. “You’ve got more applications being consolidated into a smaller space, with chips that are hotter; and the servers using them are taking up less space, and there are more of them together.”

Mouths to feed

The first step in reducing power consumption costs is to take inventory of every piece of equipment on the datacenter floor, paying careful attention to both the amount of power each device consumes and the heat that it dissipates. This survey will allow IT managers to understand what percentage of their datacenter’s available power is being consumed by existing equipment and accurately predict how long it will take until demand outstrips capacity. The results will have a direct bearing on how to proceed. If a datacenter has 18 months before it maxes out, there’s plenty of time to devise a fix. A six-month window, on the other hand, will call for more drastic action.

One of the most obvious ways to reduce energy costs is to buy gear designed with power efficiency in mind. Pick a vendor — AMD, Dell, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, or any other — and chances are it has a slew of new products that use fewer kilowatts to get the job done.

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“All of these people have moved to address a major problem, which is you just can’t power these things,” says Miles Kelley, vice president of marketing at 365 Main, a datacenter host, speaking of the top-tier server vendors. “They’ve all shown up in our datacenter, so they must all be doing something right.”

Joyent was able to tame its energy mess by replacing its fleet of old Xeon servers with Sun systems. Approximately 25 of the new boxes, or about 20 percent of its machines, feature the power-efficient Sparc T1 processor. Because of its ability handle 32 threads at a time, Sun executives say the T1 is the processing equivalent of a motor coach that can transport large numbers of passengers for less gas than dozens of smaller vehicles can.

Young says a third-party consultant who visited Joyent’s datacenter estimated the startup will save $1,200 per year for every T1-based server it uses, bringing the total saved from those machines to $30,000. The finding, which was part of an audit commissioned by Pacific Gas & Electric — the utility that serves Joyent’s new datacenter — came as something of an epiphany for Young. “The fact that all servers weren’t created equal when it comes to power consumption came onto our radar,” he says. Sweetening the deal was a rebate of almost $2,500 — or $989 per T1 box — that Joyent received from PG&E for the purchase.

The Sparc T1 servers were a logical choice for highly threaded applications such as Joyent’s database, identity, and e-mail servers. But they didn’t stack up as well on single-threaded applications, such as those based on Ruby on Rails. For the remainder of its revamped fleet, Joyent relied on Sun boxes built with AMD Opteron CPUs. Young estimates that the Opteron-based machines, which round out the remaining 80 percent of his revamped datacenter, deliver approximately 35 percent more throughput than his older servers while consuming the same wattage.

Still other options abound. While AMD and Sun started preaching the virtues of power efficiency before the topic was in vogue, Intel, after enduring unfavorable power comparisons between its Xeon and AMD’s Opteron for years, has come roaring back with its Woodcrest design, which roughly doubles the performance of the previous top-of-the-line Xeon while drawing 35 percent less power.