The true cost of my datacenter

Was having a conversation over dinner with one of the server guys, it transpires they had approached a co-location company requesting some datacenter space, enough space for a couple of EMC rigs, and about 400 servers, enough to be economical.
They approached two or three suppliers to see who was the most competitive, some datacenter specialists, and a few telecoms companies.  They were horrified with the costs. There are three main issues driving up the cost of datacenters.

Firstly the cost of power is increasing coupled with the actual thermal and power requirements of the typical server, the current servers are at the peak of the road map just before they approach lower power utilization (except for the ULV processors). 

Secondly often co-located datacenters have higher security requirements than you might have internally. Where as a big door saying stay out with a door pass works if the datacenter is downstairs and no one can get in, on an external site, I want door passes, I want cctv, even finger print or retina recognition, or bomb proof doors/gates/walls. 

Thirdly ask many of the large banks datacenter guys what their cost per cpu hour is, what there datacenter costs, and they wont know, the ‘hosting/support fee’ is absorbed into generic costs, whether IT or facilities based.  Sure they can tell you the power bill last year, facilities can tell me that, but what the value of 1u in datacenter 2 in row S14 cabinet 4, and that’s another thing.

The blades servers now coming along, whether the full power or the ultra low power processors are highlighting this, their typical power and coolant requirement is higher than previously encountered due to density. Sure I can rack 42 1u servers in a rack, but the cabling and the logistics meant, typically that I’d inter-rack a 1u with a 3u, with a 7u, with a 1u, so that I could manage the space and the cabling as well as the pwoer.
More importantly the trend is moving ever closer to one off saying to the vendors/datacenter suppliers, “You host the blades, we’ll handle the rest”, banks are not in the datacenter building/running business, handing over the ‘blade problem’ to someone else through a hosting or on demand service is therefore where the strategies are moving to.
This is where the two pronged response from IT develops.  Firstly, virtualize with vmware or consolidate your infrastructure, make everything that can be a virtual machine, virtual, secondly, outsource the grid/blade infrastructure, rent the space, the blades, the power, everything else we’ll do, the licenses/switches we can bulk buy through the procurement process, the building of the blades can be done by the deployment team.