By all accounts, data centers are supposed to grow by leaps and bounds in the next couple of years. Unfortunately, the power required to keep them humming will come with astronomical costs, to speak nothing of the tons of carbon pumped into our skies.

Accenture's Steve Nunn thinks there's one approach data center operators can use to meet the challenge.

Instead of having engineers and facilities teams working apart from the IT department, closer integration between these functions would help to ensure that energy is not wasted as a result of poor cabling and poor IT cooling.

At the same time, these companies and the hardware vendors that supply them need to be planning ahead. Today's new equipment can soon become redundant, and there is a parallel need to ensure that, when it reaches the end of its lifecycle, it can be recycled as effectively as possible.