If your company's data center is like most, your spending on server hardware is holding steady over the past several years. It's the operational expenses that are killing you. For every $1.00 you spend on new hardware, according to IDC, you spend $0.50 on power and cooling, which is more than twice what you spent five years ago.

A data center that is operating at its power and cooling limit can't grow with your business. And when you consider that growth is one of the reasons that power and cooling is such a problem for data centers, some strategies for a more efficient data center are in order.

As your business grows, your users ask for increased performance from the data center. There are more applications, there is more data, and everyone wants all of it available faster. In the data center, this means more power consumed and more heat to dissipate.

Rack-mounted and blade servers mean increased density in the server room. According to IDC, server density in the data center increases by an annual rate of 15 percent. To keep your business running, the number of servers (spurred on by affordable x86 architectures) keeps rising. By 2009, IDC predicts there will be more than 35 million servers in the world. That's about one server for every man, woman, and child in Canada.

New approaches to power and cooling are being developed that can be implemented in existing data centers or built into new ones. In-row cooling helps eliminate hot spots and provides more focused cooling than whole-room air conditioners. Some data centers in the United States are switching to 208-volt systems, which can provide power more efficiently because there is one less transformer.

IBM IT Facilities Assessment, Design and Construction Services offers a data center stored cooling solution can help deliver savings within the chiller plant, which alone accounts for one-third of total data center energy consumption. This solution helps optimize efficiency by shifting energy consumption to off-peak hours when utility rates are lower, supporting a reduction in energy usage.

IBM offers an entire portfolio of products to combat power and cooling costs under the name IBM Cool Blue. The products can be used at each of the four stages of a corporate power management strategy: presales, installation and planning, management, and cost savings.

During the presales stage, IBM Power Configurator helps users plan their server deployment. After users input their computing requirements, they receive a custom report of the power requirements and utilization rates.

In the installation and planning stage, IBM offers services that help users with assessments, budgeting, and planning for new data centers and existing facilities. The factors considered include the existing infrastructure, types of workloads, required availability, and future growth predictions.

For management, IBM System x server customers can use PowerExecutive, which measures real-time power consumption and heat emission. The graphical display allows users to monitor, predict, and even cap power consumption.

In the cost savings stage, cooling technologies like the Rear Door Heat eXchanger works as an alternative to adding air conditioning units by mounting to the back of a server rack and cooling hot air before it enters the server room.

Other IBM products, like IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager, which helps users quantify value and identify organizational barriers to the fair allocation of server and storage costs, can also track power and cooling by creating an accurate methodology for apportioning the costs.

Power and cooling concerns are also addressed in the design of new servers and racks. IBM rack solutions are engineered to optimize airflow and prevent recirculation. IBM System x and BladeCenter servers employ Calibrated Vector Cooling technology, which allows dual paths of air to reach every component.

One of the biggest offenders in the fight against power and cooling costs is server utilization. Less expensive servers led many IT departments to deploy new servers with new applications as their businesses grew, before the existing servers reached their capacity.

Virtualization allows a virtual server to be set up within an existing server. IBM introduced the idea of virtualization in the 1960s so mainframe users could partition their machines. Today, users of IBM System x and BladeCenter severs can choose to use any of the leading virtualization software solutions, including those from VMware, Microsoft, and Xen.

Virtualization allows data centers to run more efficiently by increasing utilization rates and reducing the total number of servers in the datacenter. It also has benefits beyond power and cooling, such as providing an excellent testing environment for new applications.

With the price of electricity steadily rising, and more corporations paying attention to social responsibility and so-called "green" initiatives, it's more important than ever to examine your data center's power and cooling needs. With solutions to help you keep costs in check from planning to deployment, there's more help available than ever.