Our increasing reliance on the cloud has led to the emergence of scale-out workloads. These scale-out workloads are latency-sensitive as they are user driven. In order to meet strict latency constraints, they require massive computing infrastructure, which consume significant amount of energy and contribute to operational costs. This cost is further aggravated by the lack of energy proportionality in servers. As Internet services become even more ubiquitous, scale-out workloads will need increasingly larger cluster installations. As such, we desire an investigation into the energy proportionality and the mechanisms to improve the power consumption of scale-out workloads. Therefore, in this paper, we study the energy proportionality and power consumption of clusters in the context of scale-out workloads. Towards this end, we evaluate the potential of power and resource provisioning to improve the energy proportionality for this class of workloads. Using data serving, web searching and data caching as our representative workloads, we first analyze the component-level power distribution on a cluster. Second, we characterize how these workloads utilize the cluster. Third, we analyze the potential of power provisioning techniques (i.e., active low-power, turbo and idle low-power modes) to improve the energy proportionality of scale-out workloads. We then describe the ability of active low-power modes to provide trade-offs in power and latency. Finally, we compare and contrast power provisioning and resource provisioning techniques. Our study reveals various insights which will help improve the energy proportionality and power consumption of scale-out workloads.