Nevertheless, many companies say they are willing to try automation to power-control their servers, though they are most comfortable doing that in development and test environments. Forty-three percent say they would be comfortable with automated power management for a majority of their development and test servers, and 37 percent say they would do this for low-priority production servers.

Nearly 51 percent of all companies, and over 69 percent of large enterprises, are installing more power-efficient servers today – the second most popular energy-efficiency strategy, after server consolidation/virtualization, according to Cassatt's survey. Power-management software can automate the process to actively and safely power both older and newer servers on and off as needed, adding significantly to an organization's energy efficiency results.

"While the fears about turning off servers may have had some validity in the past, they are unfounded when looking at the reliability of today's hardware and the new power-management software that is now available," said Coleman. "The Cassatt Active Response software, for example, is policy-based, application-aware, and hardware- and software-independent, so it can safely and systematically turn servers off when not needed and on when they are, with zero impact to application users. Our work with initial customers leads us to believe that organizations who see beyond these old data center myths can slice their power costs by anywhere from 30 to 50 percent."

How Big Is the Data Center Power Problem?
The Cassatt survey also showed that many data centers are on the verge of running out of the power they need to operate. According to Cassatt's survey, 42 percent of respondents have a data center within 25 percent of its maximum power capacity. And the problem is getting worse: of the 69 percent who track their power bill, 62 percent state their bill is rising.

A large number of data centers are in the dark about exactly how acute their power problem is, according to the survey. When asked "How do you measure power consumption in your server environments?" more than a fourth (28 percent) say, "We don't." And those that do have limited visibility into exactly what is using the power. Nearly 24 percent measure by groups of servers at the power distribution unit (PDU) level, 23 percent by the server room, and 16 percent by the rack of servers. Only eight percent have visibility into power consumption by individual server.