Companies that are looking towards the future today are seeing green, and it's not envy.  What lies on the horizon for the data center world are tax incentives, penalties and regulation on data center power and cooling usage.  Over the past 18 months we have seen the federal government become keenly interested in these environments and the amount of resources they use.  With servers becoming more dense and storage requirements continuing to climb, many data centers no longer have enough of either power or cooling to accommodate future demand. 

This should not however be seen as a problem, but rather an opportunity to capitalize on new technologies for competitive advantage.  Those shops who are ahead of the curve with green technology initiatives will be able to sit back and watch the mess as their competitors rush out after regulations are issued and try to snatch up the little available talent pool for virtualization, green data center design, etc.  While everyone else is in the mad rush, the early adopters are preparing for the next wave. 

What do I suggest you do?  Below are a few simple items.

Employ VMware virtualization technologies.  This alone may reduce your server count by up to 80%.  It also has the side benefit of speeding your ability to provision servers and greatly enhances your ability to develop a sound, practiced business continuity plan.

Ensure that you have a cooling efficient data center layout.  There are still many data centers that are using aesthetic layouts instead of the tremendously more efficient hot aisle, cold aisle layouts.  ALL servers today are built with a front to back cooling model, so you should have your rows of servers facing each other and inject the cooled air to that location.  You should be venting the hot air either out or back into the air cooling system.

Use power saving features on your server hardware.  With firmware and driver updates, most server equipment built in the last 5 years has some sort of power saving feature that can be enabled.  Since the servers will often sit idle for hours at a time, why not allow them to drop the cpu power usage, turn down fans or even idle the hard drives?

With even just these common sense steps you are ahead of the game.  If you are more aggressive, look at rack based cooling technologies and ditch the forced air paradigm.  There are also inert liquid cooling systems that some vendors are now selling as well.  Whatever you do, start making your plans today and begin executing on them or you may find yourself being pushed to do it by the government.