Mike Manos has a post on eliminating the cruft in data center.

Attacking the Cruft

March 28, 2012 by mmanos

Today the Uptime Institute announced that AOL won the Server Roundup Award. The achievement has gotten some press already (At Computerworld, PCWorld, and related sites) and I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am of my teams. One of the more personal transitions and journeys I have made since my experience scaling the Microsoft environments from tens of thousands of servers to hundreds of thousands of servers has been truly understanding the complexity facing a problem most larger established IT departments have been dealing with for years. In some respects, scaling infrastructure, while incredibly challenging and hard, is in large part a uni-directional problem space. You are faced with growth and more growth followed by even more growth. All sorts of interesting things break when you get to big scale. Processes, methodologies, technologies, all quickly fall to the wayside as you climb ever up the ladder of scale.

What I like is the the Power Hog part.

Power Hog – An effort to audit our data center facilities, equipment, and the like looking for inefficient servers, installations, and /or technology and migrating them to new more efficient platforms or our AOL Cloud infrastructure. You knew you were in trouble when you had a trophy of a bronze pig appear on your desk or office and that you were marked.