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One of the important aspects of managing data centers is reducing the power consumption of applications running on servers. Software developers need to be aware of the power cost of their design/coding decisions and evaluate the power performance during unit and/or system testing phases. By means of actual measurements, we show how different design decisions in a file access method can lead to significantly different power consumption in an application. However, measuring the actual power cost of applications during the testing phase is a tedious task. Therefore, we propose a methodology to develop estimation models of the power cost of applications running on servers. The estimation models have been validated by means of actual measurements of power consumed by three Linux servers and a variety of applications. Finally, we show how to automate the whole process of constructing the estimation models and using the models to estimate the power cost of applications. The automated test bench can easily be used by software developers during unit and system testing phases.