How do these trends affect the enterprise market?

"Something dramatic happened in 2006 and 2007," Brill said. "Our members—who are all enterprise sites—had been installing servers at well under-predicted rates. In 2006, the past pattern was broken for all but the bottom third (in terms of power-consumption growth rate).

"While the bottom third actually reduced their power consumption, the middle third almost doubled their rate if power consumption increased to 10 percent annually; the top third more than tripled to 22 percent annually," Brill said. "These are dramatic, budget-busting changes!"

The survey didn't reveal reasons for the abrupt change, Brill said. "Virtualization was supposed to reduce the server growth rate, but this doesn't seem to be happening yet," he said.

The single biggest problem that can be addressed relatively quickly, Brill said, is in older servers that simply aren't being used anymore.

"Unless they have been actively engaged in a de-commissioning program, most data centers have up to 30 percent comatose servers," Brill said. "These are servers that have been replaced by new technology, but the obsolete hardware is still running because no one was tasked with turning it off and removing it.

"At $700 per year just for electricity, this is an expensive waste of both money and power/cooling capacity. Step one should be making an inventory of hardware that is suspect for being no longer needed and turning it off. All virtualization projects should have an explicit step of removing the old hardware at the completion of the virtualization project."

What else can be done immediately to help save power and cooling costs?

"Applications need to be sorted into mission critical, business critical, business operational and business administrative reliability categories," Brill said. "Each application then needs to be assigned to the lowest appropriate data center tier level."