Earth Day is just around the corner on April 22, so it’s a good time to think about ways to “green” the data center — not only is it good for the environment, but saving energy saves money for your organization.

If you are in the process of deciding whether to buy new servers, it’s not just the hardware costs that matter — you need to be able to factor in power costs as well. This total cost is particularly important to calculate if your organization is also considering the option of moving to a cloud-based infrastructure or some kind of hybrid model.

TechRepublic’s new “Server Energy Consumption Calculator” provides some of the tools you’ll need to help you create a baseline of what you can expect to pay in energy costs, including an updated list of vendors, along with their estimated power needs:

The list includes many common servers available now, with the list of vendors based both on market share, with IBM, HP and Dell among those included, as well as Oracle, Fujitsu and Cisco.

The cost comparison toolkit is $49 on its own, or free if you are a TechRepublic Pro member.

You may also want to revisit some past blogs that have offered advice and tips for energy-saving and calculating costs for the data center: