Power consumption biggest concern for datacenters

Nearly all of the speakers recognized that, from a market perspective, building an efficient datacenter is increasingly critical. The DOE's Jonathan Koomey said that power use by US datacenters doubled between 2000 and 2005, despite the fact that the period saw the dot com bust. Uptime's Kenneth Brill told the audience that, currently, the four-year cost of a server's electricity is typically the same as the cost for the server itself, while John Haas of Intel said that 2010 is likely to be the point where the electricity costs of a server over its lifetime will pass the price of the hardware.