Data Centers (DCs) need to periodically configure their servers in order to meet user demands. Since appropriate proactive management to meet demands reduces the cost, either by improving Quality of Service (QoS) or saving energy, there is a great interest in studying different proactive strategies based on predictions of the energy used to serve CPU and memory requests. The amount of savings that can be achieved depends not only on the selected proactive strategy but also on user-demand statistics and the predictors used. Despite its importance, it is difficult to find theoretical studies that quantify the savings that can be made, due to the problem complexity. A proactive DC management strategy is presented together with its upper bound of energy cost savings obtained with respect to a purely reactive management. Using this method together with records of the recent past, it is possible to quantify the efficiency of different predictors. Both linear and nonlinear predictors are studied, using a Google data set collected over 29 days, to evaluate the benefits that can be obtained with these two predictors.