“When it comes to saving energy, computer vendors have delivered. They offer better, more efficient computer, storage, and networking products that require much less power than they did just a few years ago.”

So finds a recent study from Viridity Software titled “The Importance of Monitoring Utilization.”

 Configurations support smart, dynamic, distributed applications, the study says, adding that “not only that, equipment is cheaper. Virtual machines have reduced hardware costs, and the price of a server is a fraction of what it was. Opportunities abound for thrifty, energy-savvy organizations.”

And this might be a surprise, but you can thank laptop and mobile technology for these inroads: “Power considerations have been vital in the progress of these appliances, and their designers have found ways to extend both functionality and battery life. Now servers use similar technology. The CPU has become truly sophisticated in terms of power distribution, using a low-power mode when work slows down.”

In fact, the study found, “the newest CPUs can now dynamically adjust to the volume of work at hand by turning on and off cores in the system. So unlike servers ten years ago, which used the same amount of power regardless of how much work they did, new servers can adjust their power consumption to match their workload.”

And in a seeming paradox, along with such improvements “IT equipment cost has actually plummeted. Servers that once cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are now just thousands of dollars. Virtualization puts the price down to only hundreds of dollars. The price of setting up shop is staggering compared to 15 years ago.”

Yet all is not roses, as infrastructure has a ways to go yet. “Most data centers still rely on the same electrical setup that serviced them almost twenty years ago. They were built for data centers full of IT equipment that didn’t have dynamic power, when provisioning for electricity was straightforward. The power draw of any given server was constant — whether sitting idle or processing data like a mad man all day long.”

The advantage of dynamic systems in such a situation, the study finds, “is their fluidity in terms of power consumption. They have energy spikes; their power demands ebb and flow according to use – when the system is idle, they can kick themselves into a low power gear, while when they have a lot of stuff to do, they can soak up more power as required.”