Why should you invest the time to complete an application for Uptime Institute’s Green Enterprise IT Awards?

Because implementing a successful project isn’t enough – you’ve got to TELL people about it.

Winning a Green Enterprise IT (GEIT) Award does just that. When you win a GEIT Award, the Uptime Institute – The Global Data Center Authority — announces on the world’s stage that your project demonstrates thought leadership, adherence to best practices, and bold innovation.

Winning a GEIT Award enhances your stature within your organization and increases the credibility of future projects you might champion. Winners receive a complimentary registration to present their case study at the annual Uptime Institute Symposium , so you’ll be able to share your Award-winning project with your peers in a 30-minute session . And because delegates will recognize you on sight as a GEIT Winner, your networking opportunities increase exponentially. After Symposium, your presentation and case brief become part of the Path Forward, the official proceedings of Symposium hosted on the Symposium website for the benefit of the global community.

Winning a GEIT Award is smart business. Your project has already provided significant benefits in terms of increased productivity and cost efficiency, but winning a GEIT Award amplifies that benefit: when an independent team of international experts examines your project in a rigorous double-blind review process and determines that you’ve implemented the very best solution to produce the highest-impact result possible, clients sit up and take notice.

Apply now for 2012 GEIT Awards.

This week we are posting testimonials from data center managers and IT executives from around the globe who have participated in Uptime Institute’s Green Enterprise IT Awards (GEIT).

Stephen Bowes-Phipps, Data Centres Manager at University of Herfordshire

Participating in the Uptime Institute GEIT Awards has given further credibility to the work not only that I have undertook but the progress the University of Hertfordshire is making with respect to furthering the Green IT Agenda. We have also used the award to provide greater publicity to the sector to encourage others to follow our path and spend the necessary time and investment in reducing their ICT operational and environmental costs.

In a perfect world, it would be nice to believe that funding for Green efficiencies always deliver a SMART return on investment (ROI) that makes senior decision makers feel good about the outcomes. Unfortunately, that is not always the case (though it was in ours). Awards can celebrate Green IT projects that are good for sustainability but have poor or non-existent ROI. There is evidence that corporate sustainability efforts have taken a back seat during the global recession as organizations seek to retrench their positions in a shrinking market. However, consumers may just be more selective about whom they do business with, and those who can demonstrate independent accolades of using their funds to both improve efficiency and bear more responsibility for the environment and communities in which they operate in, may win the lion’s share of the new and repeat business.

Download the University of Herfordshire GEIT Case Study here.

Apply today for the 2012 Uptime Institute GEIT Awards.

Uptime Institute is now accepting applications for 2012 Green Enterprise IT Awards. The GEIT Awards recognize projects, ideas and products that significantly improve energy productivity and resource use in IT, data centers and beyond. The GEIT Awards are open to applicants in all countries and are judged by a committee of independent experts. In 2012, the Institute invites applications in 8 categories. Application deadline is February 3, 2012. Award winners for 2012 will be honored at the Uptime Institute Symposium in Santa Clara, CA, May 14-17, 2012.

Over the next few weeks we will profile some of last year’s winners, reflecting on how participation in GEIT impacted their careers and IT organizations.

Eric Swanson, Data Center Manager, at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

GEIT has definitely helped my organization. The process does take some time and effort, but my experience has been that it is well worth it. In my case it helped keep the focus on gathering metrics throughout the project, and routinely studying that data to understand where opportunities for further improvements might be. This was particularly true in our challenging environment, as we were operating in upper ASHRAE conditions with a lot of infrastructure challenges and IT load growth, pushing us beyond best practices.

Also, pursuing green technology has returned on its investment. This project was part of a larger effort to extend data center IT load, mainly through low-cost methods that greatly improved efficiencies and lessened our environmental impact. In our case the payoff was immediate.

Download the case study here.

Apply for the GEIT Awards today!

Response to the Inaugural Uptime Institute Server Roundup Contest has been great so far, with teams signing up from around the world to participate. The goal of the event is to remove obsolete servers, save energy, and save money. Decommissioning a single 1U rack server can result in $500 per year in energy savings, an additional $500 in operating system licenses, and $1,500 in hardware maintenance costs. That’s not chump change.

Winners of the contest will receive one of these beautiful rodeo belt buckles, just finished by cowboy artisans in Texas:

Winners will also be honored at Uptime Institute Symposium 2012 and their case studies will be featured sessions.

It’s not too late to sign up! Click here for the rules, and contact Uptime Institute’s Hank Seader with any questions. Deadline for the contest is February 1st, 2012.

The fastest growing market for Uptime Institute Tier Certification is multi-tenant data center service providers in the colocation and cloud computing business. Over 50% of Uptime Institute’s ongoing Tier Certifications are for third party data center service providers.

In this video, Uptime Institute VP Julian Kudritzki outlines Tier Certification’s value proposition for data center service providers.

Uptime Institute Tier Certification provide assurances to data center owners and their clients, that each and every aspect of the design meets the objective, down to the breaker and valve positioning level. It is insurance for data center owners that they don’t pay for a Tier IV and get a Tier II.

The second benefit is the external facing value. Uptime Institute Tier Certification provides marketing value for third party data center service providers. Having an unbiased third party do the due diligence on the design and constructed facility can also shorten customer’s time to contract.

For more information on Uptime Institute Tier Certification services, please contact Tom Baehr, or download this PDF.

Uptime Institute recently participated in SearchDataCenter.com’s Data Center Advisory Board Q&A on capacity planning. In the article, Steve Carter, Uptime Institute VP of Digital Infrastructure Services explains how companies can start looking at long-term planning.

Carter warns that traditional capacity planning forecasting practices will lead to over-building:

“Many new data centers are significantly over built. My belief is that using common capacity planning forecasting practices in use today will lead to at least 2X over specification of spatial requirements. Common capacity planning practices are not keeping pace with the realities of advances in hardware and the software that enables visualization/consolidation capabilities.

“I believe this gap is and will continue to lead to over-specification of total data center infrastructure requirements from the IT load perspective. Understanding how application load drives IT infrastructure requirements, and how IT infrastructure requirements drive data center facilities requirements needs to be better understood at more granular level. In the past, a lot of this was guesswork. We can no longer estimate future IT electrical loads by simply projecting past IT load parameters based on historical UPS electrical load profiles.”