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Fortunately, the UAE has long sought to present a responsible attitude towards energy use and the environment and for some time, has been an adherent of the Kyoto Protocol, which it ratified in 2005 and was the Asian representative on the executive board in 2006.

"It is this same combination of business and economic reality coupled with environmental concerns that will be the most important feature of the move to more cost-conscious data centre design and management in the future," claims Benzecry.

"And fortunately there are some obvious aspect of data centre design and management to target."

According to a recent report from semiconductor giant Intel, an estimated 7.5% of the power going into data centres actually does what it's intended to do. That leaves 92.5% to be picked up through efficiency and design changes.

With 40% of carbon impact stemming from IT equipment, something clearly needs to be done. Up to 60% of the energy bill is for cooling and market researcher IDC reckons energy costs for servers will match acquisition costs by 2012.

Add to this the fact that data centres have doubled their energy use in the past five years and it's obvious energy management is vital.

Most data centres were traditionally designed to handle an average 300 to 750 watts a square metre across the total raised-floor area.

However, the high power density of blade servers and new storage technologies require data centres to handle 3000 watts or higher, a square metre in the local area where blade servers are deployed - and this trend is expected to continue.

Research firm Meta Group predicts wattage will double over the next few years and local power requirements will pass 10,000 watts a square metre between 2008 and 2010.

The current best advice is to adopt best practices in power and cooling to deliver financial benefits and reduce the squeeze on IT budgets. But much of this will depend on when the datacentre was designed.

Industry sources suggest 87% of data centres were built before 2001. The more recent the development, the easier it will be to contain costs.

"The critical step is analysing the current operation versus the design capacity of the data centre," says Benzecry.

"Care should be taken in determining the operational temperature spread between the supply and return temperatures for the heat transfer fluids. These temperatures should be compared to the design temperature spread. By conducting an analysis, managers can determine how many watts a square metre their datacentre can handle compared to how many watts a square metre it will have to handle once high-power-density technologies are added."

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