With U.S. businesses spending more than $2.7 billion on electricity to run and cool their data centers (according to a recent AMD-sponsored study), it's no surprise that vendors have started pitching more green-friendly servers.

IBM's new BladeCenter and System X servers not only promise lower power consumption, they also aim to slash CO2 emissions. Running on low-voltage AMD and Intel processors, the servers could help conserve as much as 60 watts of energy for each two-socket blade server, IBM said. In a company with 1,000 blade servers, the new servers could reduce CO2 release by 20,000 pounds per year.

While blade server vendors have led the way with power-conscious products, conventional rackmounted server environments aren't being slighted either. Dell's recently released PowerEdge 2970 and Energy Smart 2970 rackmounted servers use 34 percent less power while providing as much as a 105 percent performance-per-watt improvement over previous offerings, Dell says.

The AMD study found that in 2005, businesses used 45 billion kilowatt hours of electricity to run their data-center servers--double the amount used just five years earlier. Low-voltage servers with smarter power supplies and better built-in cooling systems help address these data-center power challenges. --Steven J. Schuchart Jr., sschuchart@nwc.com