You may not have time to wade through the meandering verbiage in this article about data-center costs by Kenneth G. Brill. That's why we're here.

The gist: data center costs often are poorly understood and data center assets often are poorly managed. Total costs go far beyond the price of servers; CIOs need to work across the enterprise to factor in usage and facilities costs.

Electricity is expensive as hell, and Moore's Law has turned servers into energy-sucking beasts; budget accordingly. Inefficient old servers waste power; find ways to shut them down.

Lots of detail in the piece, read it at your leisure if you wish.

Since I seem to be editing Brill's work, my blue-pencil note scrawled on his draft reads: "Is this an argument for outsourcing? What can you tell us about the strategy and efficiencies of cloud vendors?"

You can read more from Brill here in this Q&A with CIOI editor Eric Chabrow.