While hardware costs are steadily falling, energy costs are rising and that’s compounded by the ever increasing power density of modern servers. The Uptime Instituteprojects energy costs to increase as much as 10X over the next five years for that same rack of servers.

This CIO Magazin article, explains that the purchase price for a rack of servers will drop from $138,000 today to about $103,000 in 2012. But the number of watts required to power a full server cabinet will increase from about 15,000 currently to between 22,000 and 170,000 depending on power improvement assumptions. As a result, within five years, the cost to power and cool a server cabinet over its three-year projected life could rise from the current $206,000 to as much as $2.3 million. That’s anywhere from 300 percent to 2,250 percent of the equipment purchase price.

Now if you are a data center customer, you have other problems, you will probably have limits in the quantity of power to use per rack. (let’s say 100, 135, or 150 watts per square feet). With newer power hungry and with the datacenter vendor traying to control its cooling cost. you can end up with a minimum of servers per rack, or with a whole lot or unused floor space, leased only to have enough cooling for your used racks.

It is difficult. to see how will this end up. There are so many optimization that can be done to reduce the amount of power to be reduced in these datacenter, arguably up to 50%. But is utility computing an alternative? or some new type of solutions (See Suns Blackbox project, it can provide up to 25Kwatts per rack).?

With in 5 years Power Cost will be 300-2250% More Than Server Hardware

$1100/megabit/month in 1995 vs. $128/megabit/month in 2005