How do you minimize the footprint of a design and still incorporate all the necessary hardware elements and electrical components?

"Designing equipment which takes up as little space as possible and fits standardized Cisco data center racks is one of the chief challenges of my job. The methodology I use to accomplish this is very large-scale integration or VLSI. VLSI reduces the size of each component and then integrates them within a single package. An example of this is taking a complex circuit board and integrating it into a single chip. The VLSI methodology not only reduces the size of the equipment, but it also reduces the required power and cooling, both of which are significant cost elements within the datacenter."