IT departments are leaving extra datacentre capacity untapped in their server rooms, according to new research from HP.

The company has kicked off a programme designed to help enterprises address a phenomenon it calls "trapped capacity".

Mark Linesch, HP's vice president for enterprise storage and server software, told vnunet.com that the problem stems from the "faceplate" maximum power load recommendations that hardware vendors place on their products.

"That is a worst-case envelope for energy capacity. What often happens is the actual energy usage of a particular server is based on its workload within the datacentre," he said.

"There is a difference between what's provisioned and what happens under load at the peak, and that is the trapped capacity."

This unused capacity means that many companies overestimate the total load on their servers, leading to floor space going unused in existing rooms while energy is wasted on otherwise unnecessary additional datacentres.

HP hopes to alleviate the problem by offering a new set of services, including a software tool that allows companies to check the maximum energy use on their servers and adjust the power load maximums accordingly.

Additionally, the company is rolling out a new consulting programme as well as a line of energy-efficient servers. HP claims that many businesses will be able to reduce operating costs, cut overall energy costs and extend the lives of older datacentre set-ups.

"The technologies that we are using are a combination of hardware and software that provide an accurate measurement based on workload at peak, and the ability to cap energy usage," said Linesch.

"What we are enabling people to do is get the real energy usage under the real application workload and say that you can fit another 15, 20, 100 servers into the power envelopes you have already provisioned."