5. Move support equipment outside.
Properly siting your computer infrastructure support systems will improve efficiency and make it easier for you to expand capacity in the future. One of the most important steps you can take is to move as much of your power and cooling equipment as possible out of your data center. In fact, if you have the space, a good solution is to move the bulk of these items outside the building.

Here's an example. When we needed a short-term fix to get 2 megawatts of additional power for a new supercomputer at ERDC, we found that we needed to add UPS and generator equipment that would not fit into the building that housed the rest of the electrical distribution infrastructure. This problem was compounded by the siting of the building 10 years ago between the foot of a steep hill and a road. The solution—to put the equipment outside in an area created by cutting into the hill—was expensive and added time delays to an already tight schedule.

Our new long-term design places most of those components outside the building in modular units in a newly created utility field. "This move eliminates the constraints that building walls place on us when we need to increase our capacity and should give us the flexibility we need for at least another decade," says Greg Rottman, the engineer in charge of implementing the upgrade.

Moving distribution and support equipment outside is also eco-friendly. In a report published earlier this year, The Green Grid found that as much as 25 percent of the electricity going into the data center is converted to heat in power distribution units, UPS equipment and switchgear. Moving this equipment out of the data center, and outside the building if possible, decreases your overall energy consumption by eliminating the need to remove the heat generated by these components.

6. Monitor for power management.
Do you know how much power you are using? Are your servers pulling more or less electricity than the vendor specs say they should be? How close to your facility's power capacity will that next machine upgrade put you?

An infrastructure monitoring system for the power and cooling systems needs to be part of any upgrade you are planning. Actively managing and monitoring your energy usage will help you plan for the future and assess the effectiveness of steps you take to improve your data center's efficiency.

Convincing senior managers to fund data center improvements not directly related to business delivery can be a challenge. You may have to build your monitoring system piece by piece as you can afford it. But it makes sense to add your power monitoring to your data center before you undertake major changes designed to save energy and improve efficiency. This will allow you to establish a meaningful baseline from which to judge the effectiveness of your changes, and more effectively plan for the future.

John West is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program and the executive director of that program's supercomputing center at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Miss.