obvious examples, with both tech giants serving up huge amounts of personalized data to legions of online consumers. Michael Bell, vice president of server research for Gartner, says he can’t even venture a guess as to how big Google’s data center has grown, but he suspects it’s responsible for a large portion of the company’s $1 billion in annual electricity spending. [The New York Times last year estimated Google had at least 450,000 servers running in 25 data centers.]

But at most companies, data centers are shrinking as servers get ever smaller, costs related to powering and cooling them are rising, and tools such as virtualization software enable single servers to act like clusters. Yet as they get smaller, corporate data centers are becoming more important to their respective businesses. There are a plethora of reasons for this, from the continued growth of electronic business to the growing need to support mobile computing to the increasing complexity of the applications data centers support. Throw in an additional consideration Bell believes is critical— namely, the transformation of applications from locally run clients into on-demand services delivered to dumb devices—and the data center’s place in the IT lineage appears safe for some time to come.

There also is a socio-environmental consideration:
In an era when the fight against global warming has
become a mainstream cause, some CIOs believe it’s
their duty to cut back on the power they use
to run and cool all of their data
center machines. But there is far
from across-the-board agree-
ment, with many CIOs
saying they’re way too
busy supporting their
company’s core businesses
to be bothered with envi-
ronmental do-goodism.
That debate aside
(we’ll get back to it
later), an indisputable
truth has arisen: It’s
time to rethink the data
center. Sun Microsys-

tems CEO Jonathan Schwartz suggested as much in a well-worded blog entry last October, concluding with this ominous thought: “Why bother with data centers at all?” In response, companies across the U.S. and around the world are taking steps, practical and creative, to transform their data centers into operations befitting their changing business environments, and in some cases, the world’s changing relationship with its resources.

Over the next two years, global advertising firm Ogilvy Worldwide plans to shrink its main New York data center to just 500 square feet from the 5,000 square feet it occupies, CIO Atefeh Riazi says. In the process, it will cut its shrinking inventory of servers from 1,500 to 750, but end up with fuller racks. It will look to deliver more business applications as on-demand services, shifting the need for computing power from the desktop to the data center. And it will make more use of virtualization, helping to reduce the number of e-mail servers it relies on from 80 to three.

“Our data center is going to be smaller in terms of space, but we’ll have much more capacity than we did before,” says Riazi. “It’s an easier environment to manage. It’s almost a utility. We know we need to start focusing on applications and services, and not so much on servers and storage and the stuff we’ve been managing for a long time.”

Welcome to the new reality confronting these once oversized rooms where workers watched over large machines whose main job was to store and serve up data to employees.

Financial giant Deloitte & Touche is on a similar path. The company has shut down 100 redundant applications in the past 18 months, including consolidating more than a dozen customer-management systems