VistaPrint has benefited in part from the increasingly heated competition among chip makers and server vendors to out-green each other. But which server provides the greatest power consumption savings for the buck depends on how you plan to use it. Existing benchmarks that measure application performance or CPU utilization aren’t much help because they don’t measure power consumption, notes Brent Kirby, a product manager with AMD. Groups including the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are researching a new generation of benchmarks that address server electricity usage, while an effort among computer manufacturers known as The Green Grid aims to identify best practices for data center power management.

Meanwhile, using more efficient cooling systems, or simply sealing holes in your data center’s floor, can reduce energy consumption and, ultimately, greenhouse gas emissions. Your company wins by lowering its energy costs, and the planet wins too.

The Green Advantage
IT’s contribution to corporate sustainability doesn’t stop at the data center door. New and anticipated environmental regulations are prompting companies to reexamine everything from their business processes to their product lines.

As Associate Staff Writer Katherine Walsh writes in “Can IT Make Your Company Green?”, companies are beginning to pay more attention not only to what goes into their products but how those products are made. And whether they’re tracking systems for monitoring plant emissions, using databases to analyze material use or implementing operational controls, they need IT to do it. These systems can pay dividends beyond keeping companies out of legal trouble, or having their noncompliant products barred from global markets. At Dow Chemical, CIO David Kepler says technology investments that monitor energy use have saved Dow billions.

Other systems are expected to generate top-line revenue growth by helping companies make better products. Both furniture maker Herman Miller and Timberland, which makes outdoor apparel, cater to environmentally conscious customers (and satisfy regulators) by developing products using recycled materials and eliminating toxics from their production processes. IT integrates the databases that track the use of materials with those that manage the production processes in order to optimize the efficiencies the companies reap from these green initiatives.

You have an advantage if your company has already made environmentally sound practices a priority. In Chicago, the law firm Kirkland & Ellis is constructing a green building, with design parameters that include lower power consumption and more efficient air conditioning. (To see the specs for the building, read “Designed for IT,” www.cio.com/inprint.)