cooling

This increase of 77 degrees Fahrenheit to 80.6 degrees may not seem like a big deal, but it took a year-and-half of work to arrive at this recommendation and agreement by most of the major equipment vendors. The person who led the society's IT team on Technical Committee 9.9 was Roger Schmidt, an IBM fellow and its chief engineer for data center energy efficiency.

With energy costs rising and data centers at the core of IT strategy for many companies, cooling the growing number of computers jammed into data centers is an issue that has taken center stage.

Data centers stand on the front lines of the battle to tame the energy consumption of information technology.