Your Guide to the Top 5 Green Energy-Efficient IT Certifications

The first thing a business discovers when it decides to pursue green IT and build an energy-efficient IT infrastructure is that making the decision is easier than figuring out which servers, storage and virtualization products will actually use less heat, cut a company's energy bill and reduce its carbon footprint.

The good news is that you don't have to scour the details of each product. There are any number of green IT and energy-efficient certification programs that will do that for you. The bad news is that there are so many green IT and energy-efficient certifications that it's hard to keep track of them all.

Here are the five most common, with a look at what each means and where it applies in your IT infrastructure and energy-efficient, green IT infrastructure plans.

Energy Star

Probably the most familiar environmental certification, Energy Star is a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Energy. Monitors, printers, scanners, AIOs (all-in-ones), desktop computers and notebooks are all candidates for the rating. To qualify, the product has to meet specific energy efficiency standards, including consuming less than a defined maximum amount of power during use and automatically entering a low-power mode when not in use. The goal is to save energy and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A Word on Energy Star

For any given type of product, the Energy Star label promises energy use below some maximum level, but for some kinds of equipment, the maximum varies more than you might expect, because it depends on the specific product's features. The maximum allowed for a laser-based AIO with fax, for example, is more than for a single-function printer that uses the same laser engine. Similarly, higher-lasers have higher maximums than lower-speed lasers.

What the Energy Star logo is telling you, in short, is that the energy use is within a defined limit for closely comparable models. A model with fewer features may actually use less energy but not qualify under the program because the rating requires a lower maximum for that constellation of features. So start by defining the features you need, and then look for an Energy Star model with those features.