Energy...

Businesses are going to have to start thinking about ways to conserve power in their datacenters immediately, according to a new report which says that two-thirds of all datacenters will not have enough electricity to handle all critical computing functions in less than three years.

The survey, conducted by Emerson Network Power, found that 64% of respondents said they would run out of data capacity by 2011, because they will not be able to get enough power to run everything.

Some respondents said they are already unable to add more data capacity due to energy concerns.

Meanwhile, only 25% of respondents said they had a plan in place to reduce their energy consumption. Oops.

Of course, at the same time, the amount of servers needed by most businesses only continues to increase. More servers equals more power consumption, which means more heat, which means more refrigeration, which means more power consumption, which...

We'll be posting several ideas to reduce IT energy consumption over the next few weeks, so stay tuned for some solutions. Meanwhile, if you have any ideas that have worked for your IT department, feel free to share them here!