Determining the environmental benefits of VistaPrint’s data center revamp is hard because of the complexities in how power is produced and consumed. But based on a model for calculating carbon emissions offered by Lawrence Berkeley, an average U.S. company that cuts its electricity consumption the way VistaPrint did in Bermuda would reduce its carbon emissions by nearly 612 metric tons.

Meanwhile, the benefits of VistaPrint’s data center changes go beyond saving money or saving the planet. Server standardization has made maintenance and upgrades easier. It’s also made IT more responsive to business needs. It used to take days to provision a new server in Bermuda. Now it takes minutes. “The business is much more satisfied with the time it takes to make changes or get new capacity,” says Cebula. “And with our better failover capabilities, we have fewer reductions in service.”

VistaPrint recently had a VMware server go down in Bermuda, and all the instances that were running on it restarted on another server. Total downtime was less than 10 minutes, with no human intervention. The business doesn’t understand why service is better, says Cebula, “but they understand the better service.” And the money IT might have been throwing away on sky-high electric bills in Massachusetts can be fueled into more sound IT investments.

“Green isn’t costing us money. Green is saving us money,” says Branham. “Interests are aligned.”