How to curb IT's hunger for power

There is increasing regulatory pressure on organisations to cut power consumption and thereby reduce their carbon footprint. While IT can be a major consumer of power, it can also play a significant part in cutting it.

Companies setting up new datacentres can benefit from the latest power management technologies to keep consumption down. Social networking giant Facebook, for example, is spending $450m (£290m) on a new datacentre in Salt Lake City. But for many firms the only option is to upgrade existing facilities and this isn't simple.

In the first part of our two-part guide to datacentres we examine the innovative technologies that can help.

Virtualisation can enable server consolidation, but there is also increased interest in the virtualisation of data storage capacity. And storage virtualisation can be supplemented by data de-duplication, which reduces the amount of data that needs to be stored in the first place.

Companies are also rebuilding datacentre networks to take out surplus routers and switches, while networking vendors are promoting the concept of the unified datacentre fabric to increase speeds while keeping costs down.

As well as looking at the technology, our guide also includes advice from infrastructure experts and IT leaders who have succeeded in making their IT estates more energy efficient.