Yes, we know it's a problem. No, we have no budget.

A survey by data center infrastructure company Voltaire indicates that while a vast majority of data center professionals believe that running a green data center will become a mission-critical agenda item, they haven't set aside the money to support it.

Close to 90 percent of the executives surveyed by Voltaire at the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium reported that making their data center greener would be crucial for their company in 2009. Yet, 76 percent also admitted they didn't have a budget committed to this priority.

Other stats to emerge from the poll: - Slightly more than 40 percent of the surveyed CIOs plan to implement a green data center within the next two years. - The most important perceived benefit of a green data center project was reducing power and cooling costs: 52 percent of the CIOs cited this objective. Other perceived values were helping the environment (37 percent), increased utilization (32 percent), shrinking real estate requirements (28 percent) and consolidating equipment (27 percent). - Approximately 72 percent of the surveyed CIOs said they believed green data center projects would would help them save money that they could put into additional new technologies.

Surprise, not! Voltaire's twist on all this is that its server and storage switches and software could help companies save 50 percent of the power related to running and cooling their server interconnections and 50 percent on hardware allocation, even while improving application performance by up to 300 percent. Here's a little more about Voltaire's "50-50-300 pledge." It's also got an energy efficiency calculator (yes, I know, another one) up on this site for those of you who want to crunch some numbers related to Voltaire's technology and your own data center scenario.