Paul Marcoux of Cisco Systems with a generator at a data center in Texas.

By STEVE LOHR

In Silicon Valley, the stars have long been charismatic marketing visionaries and software wizards. By contrast, mechanical engineers who design and run computer data centers were traditionally regarded as little more than manual laborers in the high-tech world.
For years, they toiled in relative obscurity amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems. Their mission was to keep the computers operating, while scant thought was given to rising costs and energy consumption.
Today, data center experts are no longer taken for granted. The torrid growth in data centers to keep pace with the demands of Internet-era computing, their immense need for electricity and their inefficient use of that energy pose environmental and economic challenges, experts say.
That means people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand.
Their status is growing, as are their salaries - climbing more than 20 percent in the last two years into six figures for experienced engineers.
“The data center energy problem is growing fast, and it has an economic importance that far outweighs the electricity use,” said Jonathan G. Koomey, a consulting professor of environmental engineering at Stanford University.
Many companies are working on the challenge of making data centers more efficient, using sensors and software, for example, to direct airconditioners and fans where cooling is most needed.
The problem is that most computers in data centers run at 15 percent or less of capacity on average, idling the rest of the time, though consuming electricity all the while.
The computers also generate a lot of heat, so much so that half of the energy consumed by a typical data center is for enormous air-conditioners, fans and other industrial equipment used mainly to cool the high-tech facilities.
The availability of electricity, not just its cost, presents a threat to the continued expansion of data center computing that can hamper companies across the economy, as they increasingly rely on information technology.
Based on current trends, by 2011 data center energy consumption will nearly double again, requiring the equivalent of 25 power plants. The world’s data centers, according to a recent study from McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm, could well surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020.
Now that costs and energy consumption are priorities, the data center gurus are getting a hearing and new respect.
“After 25 years, we’re finally elevating mechanical engineering and adding a lot of electrical engineering, computer science and applied physics,” said Chandrakant Patel, a mechanical engineer at Hewlett-Packard Labs. “I wish I were 20 years younger.”