Data center managers have technologies at their disposal that can nearly halve energy consumption and reduce associated greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equal to taking 8 million cars from the road, according to new research.

The Data Center Demonstration Project, launched by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, studied energy-saving technologies deployed at 17 data centers in an attempt to gauge the feasibility of recommendations issued last year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Eighteen months of research found that retrofitted legacy data centers can become nearly as energy efficient as new facilities.

And though site technology is close to the superior "state-of-the-art" scenario outlined in the 2007 EPA report, the industry has yet to fully harness the potential of virtualization and rationalization. Today's technologies can easily achieve the EPA's slightly less stringent "best practice" scenario, which can reduce energy consumption by up to 45 percent.

"We hope that in the end, or in the near term, that we'll have more folks realize they can pursue some of these aggressive scenarios," Andrew Fanara, head of the EPA's Energy Star program, said at the SVLG's Data Center Energy Summit held last week.

Accenture, which served as independent author, released the preliminary results of the Data Center Energy Forecast Report at the summit and plans to publish the full report in mid-July.

The report and project is meant as a response to the EPA's Report to Congress on Server Data Center Energy Efficiency, which estimated that electricity use in the IT sector more than doubled between 2000 and 2006, and could double again by 2011.

Based on industry input, the EPA offered a series of scenarios that could slash IT-related energy consumption. The state-of-the-art scenario, based on the adoption of the most aggressive energy savings technologies, could reduce electricity consumption by up to 55 percent compared to current trends.