Power and cooling will drive the evolution of data centers into becoming conceptual models of intelligent "living organisms.

Rakesh Kumar, vice president at Gartner, said: "'Green' requires an end-to-end, integrated view of the data center, including the building, energy efficiency, waste management, asset management, capacity management, technology architecture, support services, energy sources and operations.
Legacy data centers, constructed in the last decade are - in relative terms and particularly when addressing green' - functionally obsolete. New, high-density, power-hungry data-center equipment warrants more advanced power and cooling capabilities. If they are not fully aware of the problem, data center managers run the risk of doubling their energy costs between 2005 and 2011.
If we assume that data center energy costs continue to double every five years, they will have increased 1,600 per cent between 2005 and 2025.
"Tomorrow's data center is moving from being static to becoming a living organism, where modelling and measuring tools will become one of the major elements of its management, said Mr Kumar. "It will be dynamic and address a variety of technical, financial and environmental demands, and modular to respond quickly to demands for floor space. In addition, it will need to have some degree of flexibility, to run workloads where energy is cheapest and above all be highly-available, with 99.999 per cent availability.