'Go green or face financial doom'

With server rooms growing and electricity costs rising, IT departments need to embrace energy efficiency to save the planet and money, according to Gartner.

The analyst house names high-density servers as the main culprits for excessive energy consumption as they use between 10 and 15 times more power than traditional server environments.

Even worse, the energy costs double when you factor in all other aspects of a standard data centre - including the air-con, storage devices and uninterrupted power supplies - compared with the energy cost of the servers alone.

This will have a major impact on IT budgets in future, said Gartner, with energy costs rising from less than 10 per cent of the budget to more than half within the next few years.

But most CIOs will not be able to convince the board to simply increase budgets.

And the potential to overspend on power will impact on the IT department's ability to grow and meet business needs in the future, Gartner predicts.

Instead IT leaders must adopt 'greener' approaches to data centres. The analyst advises CIOs to optimise use of existing equipment to delay moves to the high density systems that eat up the most power.

Vendors also have an important role to play in developing more energy efficient kit - though Gartner admits much of the technology to limit power consumption will not be available within the next five years.