At EMC, we're about to replace 1,600 physical servers with 40 physical servers. The 40 servers will be bigger, but the effort will still bring about a dramatic carbon-footprint reduction.

We have a huge opportunity to drive utilization rates up via server virtualization, boosting our CPU utilization, and creating our own internal cloud. It's our next wave of going green.

Imagine how much space and cooling 1,600 servers demand. And when you shrink 1,600 to 40? Do the math.

The same math goes for storage. We're replacing 47 aging CLARiiON arrays with 12 CLARiiON CX4 systems, and in the process, we're removing 4,000 disks from the data center. We've implemented Avamar at 149 sites in 44 countries, deduplicating all the information in those offices in the process.

Using EMC's SourceOne, DiskXtender, and Rainfinity technologies, we've implemented e-mail, database, and file systems archiving to drive hundreds of terabytes of data from Tier 1 storage to archiving on EMC Centera, where it is compressed, deduplicated, and no longer needs to be backed up.

We've been fine-tuning our storage-management processes seemingly forever, and we've brought utilization up to a point where in a physical world, it's about as good as it gets. But in a virtual world, with thin provisioning, we expect to boost utilization by another 10-15 percent. We continue to make use of next-generation Flash and other large-capacity drive technologies, too.

For our six-petabyte-and-growing internal installed base, this translates into an additional 600TB to 1PB of data that we can milk out of the storage we currently have on our floor.