How to Calculate Your Green IT Cost Savings With Microsoft’s Green IT Solution Calculator

Green is in. With the environment and today’s economy, saving money and saving energy go hand in hand. By calculating your savings, you can put a little more coin in your pocket, and a little less carbon in the environment. Microsoft enables you to configure your Information Technology Systems for the maximum savings that you can manage by presenting the Energy Saving Calculator located at http://www.microsoft.com/environment/greenit.

When you go to the site, you are presented with some information about how Microsoft assists you in improving your energy savings. Then you are presented with the energy saving calculators. This includes using Windows Vista and virtualization on your servers. Your options are the Preview Sample Results for the Desktop Energy Savings Calculator, Register for a full assessment, and the same options for the Server Energy Savings Calculator.

Clicking on the Desktop Sample Results page brings up a wheel that you can configure with the following options: the number of PC’s, a percentage of LCD to CRT monitors, a percentage of Desktop to Notebooks, and the percentage of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows “Other” computers. For me, having 3 computers, where one is an LCD, one is a CRT, and one is a notebook, my energy consumption is estimated at 2,737 kW/h, power costs are estimated at $267/yr, and my estimated carbon emissions are 2.1 tons. That’s the equivalent of .4 cars, .2 houses or 4.6 trees.

For an enterprise network, or a home network that contains servers, you can use the Server Energy Savings Calculator. Your options are the number of servers, and the number of servers after virtualization. The information shown to you includes the amount of carbon reduction if you consolidate servers (virtualize), the number of planted trees that the savings equal, energy savings in dollars, equivalent of the reduction in homes and cars that your savings would produce.

If you need more accurate information than what is provided in the sample results, you can register for the full assessment. The full registration gives you the ability to configure your setup by where you live in the world (and State), the number of desktops and notebooks, the number of LCD and CRT monitors, and you can specify the number of desktops and notebooks that have each version of Windows installed. The Server Energy Savings Calculator will allow you to specify the location that you are in, the number of servers, the growth expected, and the number of consolidated servers. At that point, it will show you various graphs which demonstrate your savings.

While the Microsoft Energy Savings Calculator is limited to Windows systems, it presents you with some useful options. If you’re looking for new hardware or considering alternatives for your existing systems, this calculator will give you some valuable information for your decisions.