There are several options at hand when it comes to optimizing your data center’s performance. Viridity, for example, offers a software product called Energy Check. Energy Check is able to analyze server power utilization, deliver report summaries concerning said utilizations and it also numerates overall power/cooling saving opportunities in as little as a week.

Viridity even offers a free “lite” version of the software for customers interested in greener data center management.

What do industry experts have to say about it?

Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said the tool can give customers some quick and easy insight into their IT environment. "Being free, it eliminates a whole cycle of budget approvals and purchasing. Users can simply download and collect data and get some value. Think of it as a no-risk, no-pressure, try before you buy.”

Any cognition towards making the data center greener and leaner is welcome news to us – but there is other pertinent information in the pipeline.

According to a recent Pike Research (News - Alert) study, the energy efficiency benefits of the emerging cloud computing market are having a positive effect on green data center operations and energy output.

What does this shift in technology really mean for the data center market? According to the study, the movement equates to about a 38 reduction in global data center energy expenditures over the course of the next ten years.

“The growth of cloud computing will have a very significant positive effect on data center energy consumption,” said Pike Research’s senior analyst Eric Woods. “Few, if any, clean technologies have the capability to reduce energy expenditures and GHG production with so little business disruption. Software as a service, infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service are all inherently more efficient models than conventional alternatives, and their adoption will be one of the largest contributing factors to the greening of enterprise IT.”

According to Pike, which is an analyst group dedicated to giving in-depth analysis of global clean technology markets.

Growth in actual cloud computing revenue, as per the survey, is slated “to continue worldwide between now and 2015 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.8 percent, with the market increasing from $46.0 billion in 2009 to $210.3 billion by 2015.