With VMworld beginning in Las Vegas this week, we are sure to hear all about new and innovative ways to expand your organization’s approach to cloud computing.  “Project Horizon” was previewed at last year’s VMworld, a cloud-based management service that aims to establish a users cloud identity.  With Project Horizon and the seemingly thousands of other cloud projects occurring, the demand for massive data centers is on the rise.  As their need continues to grow, the immense power they use has become so much of an issue that metrics were created to measure how efficient data centers are.  One of these metrics is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a ratio of total amount of power used by the facility to the power delivered to computing equipment.  An ideal PUE is 1.0, which would mean the computing equipment is using all of the power coming into the facility.  However, a PUE of 1.0 is very difficult to achieve due to the need for lighting, cooling, and other various systems used in the facilities that are not considered computing devices.  An additional way companies are trying to reduce cost and power consumption is by building modular data centers.  The modular data center approach adds capacity as it is needed in manageable, cost-effective increments.  Below you will see five traditional data centers that use alternative energy as a power source, as well as a brief look at currently available modular data centers.