It’s garnered government interest too. A federal law enacted in December compels the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to examine power consumption in data centers, evaluate what technology manufacturers are doing to increase energy efficiency and determine what incentives could convince companies to adopt more energy-efficient technology. The European Union is studying the level of carbon emissions from computer equipment. Down the road, local and federal governments in the United States and abroad may end up penalizing organizations that operate inefficient data centers, according to Rakesh Kumar, Gartner research vice president.

The combination of financial, environmental and legislative pressure will force IT organizations to develop greener data centers, says Kumar. By 2011, Gartner predicts, a quarter of new data centers will be designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum negative environmental impact. But what that means may vary by organization. “There’s no generally accepted, standardized way to build a green data center,” says Kumar.

At VistaPrint, becoming green has proven easier than Cebula thought. The company bought more energy-efficient servers and improved utilization in its primary data center in Bermuda, steps that have reduced energy usage by 75 percent. As a result, the company expects to save nearly half a million dollars over three years and estimates it will reduce its output of carbon dioxide emissions by several hundred tons in this year alone. That’s equivalent to taking more than 100 cars off the road for a year.

VistaPrint also decided to locate a new data center in Canada, where hydroelectric power—a renewable energy source—keeps power costs stable and has potential to lower VistaPrint’s electricity bills by another 70 percent. “We were able to reduce our footprint at a time when it was very important to us financially,” says Cebula. “And it’s much more green.”

High-Density Power Surge

Back in 2000, when VistaPrint founder and CEO Robert Keane moved company headquarters from Paris to Waltham, Mass., the fledgling operation was bringing in just over $6 million in annual sales (the company makes business cards and other printed products to order). During the next five years, the company (which is officially based in Bermuda) saw its revenue explode. VistaPrint outgrew its 7,000 square feet of suburban Boston office space and moved a few miles north to a Lexington, Mass., location eight times larger.

During those years, the company focused on automating and optimizing the product design and manufacturing process at its Venlo, Netherlands, plant. The only concern when purchasing equipment—whether for the company’s main Bermuda data center (which runs VistaPrint’s website and transaction systems and is hosted by Cable & Wireless) or for the one in Lexington (which supports internal systems and IT production)—was that the equipment work. As a result, VistaPrint procured a hodgepodge of servers: back-end systems, front-end systems and databases each ran on different gear, says Cebula. By 2004, VistaPrint got caught up in the blade craze, purchasing machines from IBM.