There's a great deal of talk about greening the data center, but according to a panel of experts at a recent Green IT conference, many CIOs are still stuck in the past when it comes to using greener, cleaner, energy-saving technologies. One panelist likened today's data centers to gas-guzzling SUVs.

Those opinions were voiced at the recent "CIO as Data Center Optimizer: Green Tech and Evolving Software Applications" conference held at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. At the conference Ruth Harenchar, vice president of Consulting Services at TechnoDyne, said that most data centers are still startlingly inefficient, using designs that haven't changed for years.

Computerworld reports that Harenchar said that data centers are energy-wasters. She added, "The legacy data center is amazing to me. If you have seen one data center, you have seen all that ever existed."

To show just how energy-inefficient data centers are, Cheemin Bo-Linn, CEO of Peritus Partners, noted that even though a data center typically uses 2 percent of a company's facilities space, it uses a whopping 40 percent of the company's energy.

She went on, "The data center doesn’t have to be the same box it’s been for the last 70 years," and said that most existing data centers are like an "energy-guzzling SUV."

Bo-Linn and others offered a variety of solutions, including cutting cooling costs by moving data centers underground or building them there in the first place, as well as using virtualization. They also said that managing data more effectively, to cut down on big storage systems, will help. So will deploying desktop-management software for reducing PC power consumption.