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Saving on data center energy is often simply a matter of low-cost, easy to implement technologies.

The world's biggest Internet companies have dreamed up some innovative, high-profile ways to make their data centers greener, from Google's piping in seawater to cool a data center in Finland to Yahoo's designing data centers based on chicken coops that utilize the flow of outside air. But as it turns out, it's not really the experimental, novel tech that's going to make a big difference in terms of the overall energy-consumption reduction for the majority of the world's data centers. It's the low-cost, easy and just plain boring stuff that will be the most important.