Up to this point, barriers to the adoption of such practices and policies have been largely organizational, according to the EPA. They include lack of efficiency definitions for servers and data centers, split incentives (in which case those responsible for purchasing and operating IT equipment are not the same people who pay the power and cooling bills) and risk aversion (a result of the increasing importance of digital information and the criticality that data centers avoid downtime).

Overcoming these barriers to energy efficiency, which Brill calls an “environmental and IT economic productivity imperative,” is essential to the livelihood of the entire company. While data center operations require a fundamental change in order to stay viable, there are certain things that can be done right now to improve efficiency. “Many technologies are either commercially available or will soon be available that could further improve the energy efficiency of microprocessors, servers, storage devices, network equipment and infrastructure systems,” according to the EPA report. Existing technologies and design strategies have been shown to reduce the energy use of a typical server by 25 percent or more.

Simply keeping track of and turning off what Brill refers to as “comatose servers” could result in significant energy savings. Brill explains how one Fortune 500 company using the Uptime Institute’s services to help prep its board of directors on a new $5 million data center had no idea where its inefficiencies lay. “They didn’t know how many servers were active and inactive; they hadn’t done anything with virtualization or PC power management.” Decommissioning equipment, employing virtualization and utilizing power management features could have saved the company $250 million, says Brill.

A white paper by the Uptime Institute titled “The Invisible Crisis in the Data Center: The Economic Meltdown of Moore’s Law” predicts a growing gap in the next five years between the energy demands of computing centers and efforts to curb consumption through energy efficiency. Uptime's research suggests that facilities’ costs have grown from the historic one to three percent of IT’s total budget to now become five to 15 percent.

To lessen this gap, Brill outlined issues that he says will play a critical role in the future of data center energy consumption: