Closer monitoring of various hardware components will have an incremental benefit when it comes to data center energy efficiency, but the biggest opportunities - and challenges - come with keeping the environment cool. "Cooling is by far the biggest user of electrical power in the data center," says Steve Carlini, global director of data center solution marketing at Schneider Electric, a vendor of data center power and cooling products. "That area may take up to 40 or 50 percent of all the power going into your data center." That explains why IT managers use a variety of techniques to ensur...