HP this week added power capping capabilities to its Insight Control management suite, allowing IT shops to better tune how much electricity is consumed by servers without necessarily sacrificing performance.

"Power capping has the effect of lowering the processors' speed by a few tenths of a gigahertz," Scott Farrand, HP's vice president of industry standard software, told internetnews.com.

While that may not seem like a lot, the relationship between processor speed and power consumption is not linear. Further, a server's processors may be running at full speed but only need 30 percent of that speed to handle the applications it's running.

HP joins IBM in developing advanced power management tools for data centers. Can others be far behind?