When I was proofing the last chapter of my book, I thought I was going crazy. I was under a deadline, working around the clock, and I was thinking some ridiculous thoughts.

I remember it well. It was a Saturday. My wife and friends were at an outdoor festival drinking margaritas and soaking up the summer sun. I, on the other hand, was hunched over my ThinkPad, second-guessing my copy editor at every turn: “Is it really ‘data center’? Why isn’t it ‘datacenter’?”

Part of me was also thinking, “I finished this puppy a year too late. Consolidation is so yesterday, and in one more year the whole virtualized storage thing will be old news, too!”

Maybe it was the margarita envy talking. Or my Vitamin D deficiency. But in retrospect, it seems now I wasn’t as prescient as I'd thought. There was, and still is, a lot of market consolidation going on (EMC, Cisco, H-P, and others are all buying companies at good clip). Storage area networks are now the rule instead of the exception. And raw disk prices have continued to plummet.

But a lot of us who are managing data centers are still in the same boat we were in three years ago. Only the situation is much worse. I completely underestimated the long term impact of not enough physical consolidation (buildings, data centers, storage, servers, etc.).

Last week, I was in Baltimore for the
Telecommunications Carrier Group Energy Summit. This event was a major step forward in addressing the problems of power consumption and efficiency at both the chipset and the power supply level. This event was also a major step forward in addressing the problem at a macro level for both the central office and the data center.

We are now facing a new energy crisis because of the high rate of data growth and because of limited physical consolidation. We need to prioritize consolidation to reduce waste and inefficiency in the CO and in the data center. And given that more than half of all the electricity produced in the United States is from non-renewables, we need to prioritize consolidation for reasons more important than just the bottom line.