The online carbon footprint and power consumption calculator from Logicalis will help organizations estimate the advantages of virtualization.

An excerpt from TechWorld:

The tool is only for U.S.-based IT users. Users enter the state location of their data centre, followed by the numbers of PCs, servers, blade servers, enterprise and mid-range arrays, enterprise storage switches and network devices in their organization. The tool then calculates their annual energy usage, assuming 24×7 operation and average energy rates gleaned from Logicalis’ own experience.

It also calculates your annual energy costs: by entering in a parallel column on the Web form the number of virtualized devices in each category, you can see the energy savings in kilowatt hours and in dollars and the lowered carbon emissions.

Recently, IBM had also announced a tool for enterprises to calculate their data center carbon footprint. Data center efficiency is an area of increasing concern, because power consumption is a major drain on the scalability of IT infrastructure and the associated environmental costs.

The carbon footprint calculator can be accessed from here.