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The problem is anything but trivial: building a new data center can easily run into the tens of millions of dollars. Whether building a new site or modifying an existing one, Claunch says that "the time to plan for the power and cooling needs is at the beginning, because it's disruptive and expensive to build in the additional power and cooling later in the process."

Some buildings can be retrofitted by raising the floor to run additional cooling equipment or ducting to change the airflow patterns. In other cases, underfloor space can be freed up for the installation of cooling gear by rerouting signal and network cables to an overhead tray. A better route, says Claunch, may be to check the local corporate real-estate market for a data center that was part of a failed dot-com or some other fast-shrinking business that no longer needs a 21st-century glass house. "There is a lot of space on the market, including improved data-center space that's just sitting there." Who would have thought that the bursting of the Internet bubble would have benefited, of all things, the good ol' corporate data center?

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