In the fall of 2005, shortly before Cebula became CIO, VistaPrint’s then-COO, Alex Schowtka, hired Branham as director of IT operations. Branham thought blades were a mistake. The problem was the total power pull. “Blade servers look great on paper,” Branham says, “but you start piling them into a rack and suddenly you’re out of power, you’re out of AC.”

VistaPrint wasn’t the only company that was getting burned by its decision to buy high-density equipment. With quality data center space priced at a premium, companies sought out more compact gear, and vendors happily obliged. “The focus was on getting as much computer power in as small a package as possible,” explains Gartner’s Kumar. “Energy was not part of the design mentality.”

But blade servers need more power than less-dense hardware. A full rack of high-density servers requires 20 to 30 kilowatts of electricity, while traditional data centers are designed to provide 2 to 3 kilowatts per rack. Meanwhile, according to the Uptime Institute, using high-density equipment triples or quadruples facility cooling costs. Energy prices have risen as well.

CIOs who assumed that data center costs would decline as servers got cheaper and more powerful received a rude awakening. In what Kenneth Brill, founder and executive director of the Uptime Institute, calls “the meltdown of Moore’s Law,” the energy required to power and cool $1,000 worth of server equipment has skyrocketed from 8 watts in 2000 to 109 watts today—eroding some of the benefits from more powerful chips. In the best-case scenario, says Brill, within five years it could take 157 watts to run the same $1,000 worth of hardware; in the worst case, 1,650 watts. In fact, the blade server’s selling point—its size—has become irrelevant for some customers. Data center operators find themselves using only two servers in a rack designed for 10; packing any more than two high-density servers in a rack makes them too hard to cool.

That was VistaPrint’s quandary. It was the first Cable & Wireless customer in the Bermuda data center to install blades. And the outsourcer was none too thrilled. Cable & Wireless wanted to limit VistaPrint to one blade server per rack. VistaPrint got the vendor to agree to placing two servers per rack, but talk started of an energy surcharge. For years, most outsourcers charged for data center space based on square footage—a metric that did not take into account electricity costs. As a result, says Lawrence Berkeley’s Koomey, the outsourcers created a perverse incentive. “If you charge by the square foot, of course the customers want fully packed racks,” Koomey says.