His staff can remotely and proactively deal with servers and network problems, and deliver new IT services more quickly (see story above). One example is an application that supports Pennsylvania's revised "Do Not Call" law, which allows consumers to register their cellular and land-line numbers. Staffers delivered the application within 45 days, on time and within budget, Nester says.

"A few years ago, that would have been an eight-month project," says Assistant CIO Jim Ingalzo.

Built to Last?

In some cases, building and design issues drive decision-making. Hawaii Pacific Health found that it couldn't bring more power into its main data center because the floor was too weak to support any more uninterruptible power supplies.

Rather than spending $500,000 to reinforce the floor, Hawaii Pacific has kept its electricity usage level by virtualizing more and more of its 300 servers, and it has moved to new blade servers whose power can be raised or lowered as processing loads change.

IT Director Colbert Seto will also upgrade the health care provider's Hewlett-Packard SANs to support the rollout of a new electronic medical record system for 3,000 concurrent users. The growth in storage demand, he says, threatens to overwhelm any cost savings he might achieve through server virtualization. Seto is counting on the eventual use of de-duplication technologies (which store only changes in previously backed-up data) to reduce future storage growth, along with new policies that reduce how much data users keep in the first place.

Some data center managers find that budgets are so tight that all they can do is play for time. That's the case for Randi Levin, chief technology officer and general manager of IT for the city of Los Angeles. Like many other IT managers, she's about to run out of power and cooling at the city's main downtown data center. But with the city facing a deficit of more than $400 million, it's unlikely she'll get the $28 million to $30 million needed to upgrade the facility -- even if that was a worthwhile investment for a data center at the bottom of a high-rise building in an earthquake-prone city.

Levin says IBM is in the early stages of a study to find a way to virtualize the 600 servers in the facility down to as few as 30 or 40 physical machines. She says she hopes server virtualization will let her use the existing facility for another two or three years while she develops other long-term options.

At NewBridge Bank, Balentine believes he has created an infrastructure that could support the bank's growth to "a $10 billion organization in five years," and he says that scalability "will be a feather in our cap when we have the opportunity to acquire other banks."

Middleton hopes his new building will give Christus Health room to grow for the next 10 to 15 years.

For various reasons, and within a range of time frames, the push is on to revamp data centers to save money in the short run -- and build new ones to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the long run.

Scheier is a freelance writer in the US. You can contact him at bob@scheierassociates.com.