Last Updated on Thursday, 18 March 2010 08:10 Written by Chris Hunter Thursday, 10 January 2008 19:00

This call center could

A) Produce on a much more efficient level with more computing power

B) Take on distributed loads, and put them on the secondary idle CPUs all the time. Maybe even write off half of the electricity bill as "donated to the general good," because of processing help to Rosetta@Home

C) Use less energy.

To upgrade all of those older computers might be a tad on the expensive side upfront, but the resultant power bill savings would cover the cost of the upgrade. Start with an AMD X2 BE-2400, the best of their low-watt processors, at $100 per processor and probably lower with bulk rates. Throw in a sub-$50 motherboard with onboard video and audio, followed by a $50 gigabyte of ram and a $60 hard drive. All that is left is some bulk economy SATA DVD drives with bulk OEM Keys for Windows XP. Each machine would cost roughly $400. It would be even cheaper if Linux was utilized.

That price is not bad, considering the antiquated CRT can still be used. However, they draw more power and produce more heat versus the standard LCD, all of which translates into electricity costs. Employees will also spend less time waiting for their computers to catch up with XP and more time being productive. Do not forget about the marketing angle of being "green". The fact that the company can now claim a conscious is a BIG selling point for today's "conscientious consumers." On top of that, the power savings are tremendous.

Let us put this call center in a decently populated state such as Illinois.

calculating electricity costs

At a flat average for easier math, the cost of electricity is  $.08 per KWhr. A 24/hour 365 call center would have an average yearly bill of $97843.20 just for the electricity to run the computers. Theoretically, this money is spent to run somewhere in the neighborhood of 1TFlop/sec in processing power.

Versus:
When looking at the green solutions,  there is an estimated $31449.60 cost per year for low wattage systems.

The upgrade? Just the clients, and there are 1000 clients and nothing else, would cost $400,000. Ouch, sure, but what is the cost of our environment?  In addition, the increase in computational power would greatly increase the work output of workers, with a grand total of 4.6Tflops/sec.

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