Last week at the Uptime Institute Symposium, I met with Ken Ostereich of Cassatt and we chatted about the need for a radical change in data center design and operations in order to achieve the Uptime Institute’s challenge for end users to reduce energy consumption in the data center by 50% over the next 36 months. Ostereich observed that the proposed solutions are so incremental, a 50% reduction isn’t likely.

Christian Belady, Principal Power and Cooling Architect at Microsoft, actually compared the level of innovation to the movie Groundhog Day, 1993 Bill Murray classic where he has to repeat the same day over and over again.

In the video below, Ostereich calls on the data center industry giants like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft to serve as a “Data Center Space Program” helping best practices and new technologies trickle down into the more traditional companies. Ostereich has an excellent rundown of the week’s events on his blog, Fountainhead.

While the pace of change can be painfully slow, I argue that the innovations Ostereich and Belady are calling for are already happening.

Microsoft is exposing its internal operations to the public, and while they might not be giving away the secret sauce, if you’re paying attention you can still see the shape of what they’ve got under the sheet. They’re proving it can be done.

I too have heard the cries for metrics, hot-ailse/cold-aisle and virtualization ad nauseum at every conference over the past two years. But end user panelists at companies like Ford Motors and Boeing are talking about using cloud computing for non-critical applications and shutting down servers during the off hours.

Granted, many companies are putting blanking panels in their racks, virtualizing a few servers and calling it the best they can do, but those companies likely won’t be running data centers at all in five years. Google and Microsoft will be running their IT for them.