Electricity used to be an afterthought for most IT departments and solution providers. Not anymore.

"In the last six months, power monitoring and management has gone from an occasional conversation to multiple conversations that I have every day," says David Heftka, a senior technical support engineer at Ingram Micro.

At the very least, you don't want to install a solution that fries a circuit or raises the heat in a server room to 95 degrees. More important, though, are the consulting opportunities and additional sales that a professional power assessment can create.

Energy consulting doesn't necessarily have to involve sophisticated tools. One basic service that any solution provider can offer is to implement the power-saving features that are already on clients' PCs and servers. The typical 2,500-PC organization can expect to save as much as $43,300 a year simply by employing power management on its PCs, according to a report published in February by Gartner.

Promising opportunities can be found in energy consulting as well. Patrick Ciccarelli, CEO of Varsity Technologies, an IT consulting firm, has been promoting sustainable IT that starts with the company's EnergyIQ, an assessment to discover energy and operational inefficiencies. "We have to think strategically, and we work with other partners, including developers, energy consultants and architects, to move outside of IT to the decision makers of the organization," he says. Focusing on energy gets the attention of customers in education, for instance, because powering and cooling IT can account for as much as half of a school building's energy consumption.

To support such efforts, manufacturers such as American Power Conversion (APC), Eaton, Liebert and Para Systems are providing products that monitor and help manage server rooms and data centers.

APC considers itself a player in an emerging category: products that combine the monitoring and management of the IT infrastructure with the physical building infrastructure, says Kevin Kosko, senior product manager for data center solutions and software at APC. Within its Data Center Physical Infrastructure Management suite of products, APC sells InfraStruXure Central (IC), a server loaded with software that monitors and manages power, cooling and security devices in the building.

The software collects information via either SNMP or ModBus from such equipment as power distribution units and UPSs in the data center, says Kosko, and stores it on the IC server. Such data can help IT staff make more intelligent decisions about where to put new servers or install high-density racks.

"Where a small or medium-size company places a new server," says Kosko, "can have just as serious an impact for a small company as for a big company like Google with thousands and thousands of racks."