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Energy Efficiency: What You Can Do: Page 3 of 9

While many data centers are using hot and cold aisles, implementing air monitoring equipment can gauge its effectiveness. This is important, because when equipment is moved around or retired, temperatures will change, and such a technique can give managers more confidence to raise temperatures in the data center to the optimum level. Studies have shown that for every one degree you can raise the temperature in a data center, energy costs will be cut by 4 percent.

Consolidating servers and getting rid of older equipment through virtualization could make a substantial dent. According to Michael Crader, who heads Windows consolidation at U.K. telecom giant BT, his company was able to save $2.5 million annually on the energy bill, largely by virtualizing server infrastructure.

Unfortunately for storage managers, these three actions aren’t directly storage related.

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*The Wikibon Project, of which David Vellante is co-founder and contributor, is a research and advisory community of practitioners dedicated to the open sharing of business technology knowledge.