To really squeeze your power consumption you need to be able to manage your data center like a video game, watching application usage, powering servers up and down, shifting load from one data center to another, reconfiguring racks and servers with power and cooling impact in mind.

FORBES: Power Management Questions for Every CIO

Next he pushed executives to develop a new marketing strategy based on energy conservation, again building off the experience at APC, which came to dominate the data-center business by developing new products, including cooling systems that adjust themselves to the demands of individual server racks.

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The good news for CIOs is that a growing amount of vendor investment has been drawn to this market, which Gartner has named Data Center Infrastructure Management. nlyte software, for example, provides a modeling, monitoring, and management suite for understanding power and cooling in a data center and optimizing placement and configuration of racks and servers.

FORBES: Power Management Questions for Every CIO

They are curbing run-away energy with a combination of micro-level controls (for individual servers, power distribution units, air-flow controllers, and cooling units) as well as macro-level controls and policies (for racks of servers, rows of racks, and entire data centers).

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