We've discussed the soaring need for storage [1], driven in part by compliance needs. Associated with that are soaring energy costs, which you can't ignore. EMC thinks that such costs will rise to 50 percent of the IT budget in just a few years. Storage presents special energy problems that most firms have yet to address. Now might be a good time to start thinking about how you can cut storage energy costs before they really get out of hand. Consolidating your hardware is a good place to start. More tips can be found here [2]. There are some tricky integration issues [3] for your IT guys to grapple with.