Think building an eco-friendly data center is just for tree huggers? Think again -- for IBM and other pinstriped redoubts, it's all about boosting the bottom line.Delivering a keynote presentation at Interop in New York City on Thursday, IBM storage VP Barry Rudolph put the benefits of going green in dollars and cents. "The cost of powering and cooling a server is now equal to its acquisition cost," said Rudolph, who added that the total cost of powering such systems over their lifespan will soon exceed that sticker price.

Rudolph called that fact "the IT industry's inconvenient truth."

The numbers are staggering. The cost difference between running a hot and sweaty data center and a state of the art cool room can literally be hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for a large corporation. "Energy costs are going crazy," said Rudolph.

Ironically, limiting power consumption may be the one aspect of IT management where slower is better. Those old tape storage systems? They consume far less power than constantly spinning disk drives -- and for that reason they may be poised for a comeback. "Tape systems consume no incremental power," said Rudolph.

The best plan is to put only the most critical data on fast disks, and confine what you can to tape, Rudolph said.

Another way to cut power costs is to offshore your data center -- in a sense. As remote management technologies improve, the physical location of a data center becomes less important. That means companies can start to contemplate placing IT infrastructure in locations that require less artificial cooling. Like Alaska. "The ideal is to locate the data center in a cool climate, near a power source," said Rudolph.

Energy costs are a burden for all companies -- but it may be the case that not enough decision makers are putting the issue on the front burner.

Rudolph referenced an Interop survey that revealed that only 12% of attendees feel it's important for them to learn more about power conversation, while 20% said it's not an issue. The rest were in between.

Those numbers are likely to change as more and more businesses get squeezed. Said Rudolph, "This is not a fad."