Data center managers will face a lot of challenges over the next few years. In many facilities, three pressing problems need to be solved in the immediate future: limited power, increasing cooling demands, and space constraints.

The growing urgency of power and cooling problems is apparent to anyone who has been operating a data center over the last 10 years. Power and cooling are becoming as expensive as the IT equipment itself. In fact, power and cooling-driven utility bills now represent 25 percent to 40 percent of the operational expenditures in most data centers.