According to Uptime Institute’s Second Annual Data Center Industry Survey, reducing data center energy use is an important concern to an overwhelming majority of data center owners and operators.

Uptime Institute Symposium is the must-see Green IT event of the year. Our keynote presenters are pulled from today’s headlines. Our annual Green Enterprise IT Award Winners provide groundbreaking, repeatable case studies. And Uptime Institute and 451 Research experts provide you with the information and leadership you need to drive Green IT initiatives at your own organization.

Highlights from Symposium’s Green IT sessions below:

-Facebook’s senior data center engineers will discuss details of the social media juggernaut’s Open Compute Project.

-Greenpeace’s Senior IT policy analyst Gary Cook will discuss his organization’s latest report on carbon and cloud computing.

-Deutsche Bank’s chief scientist Andrew Stokes will show how this financial institution’s investment in hyper-efficient operations has paid off.

-Dean Nelson will walk us through eBay’s engineering marvel in the Arizona desert – Project Mercury, a hot-water-cooled data center that operates at temperatures as high as 115 Fahrenheit.

-Winners of the Inaugural Uptime Institute Server Round-Up, AOL, will show you how they decommissioned and recycled 9,484 outdated servers to take home the trophy.

-The Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps, MBA students partnered with companies to drive energy efficiency, will discuss how their projects so far have saved 1 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually and $1billion in net operational costs over the project lifetimes.

This is your last chance to register for the most important Green IT event of the year, featuring leadership sessions from Uptime Institute Founder Ken Brill, The Green Grid and Stanford Professor and energy researcher Jonathan Koomey. Sign up today, and follow Symposium on Twitter at #Uptime12.

This is an overview of a session that will be presented at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2012. Click here to register.

For years, the data center industry has braced itself for extreme increases in computing density and the alarming consequences those increases are supposed to bring. But for as often as data center vendors have claimed the sky is falling, such dire predictions may not reflect reality.

The Uptime Institute set out to determine how prevalent high-density data center deployments have become, and surveyed its members in North America and EMEA on the power density in their facilities. The data is in, and it suggests that while high-density server deployments are out there, they are the exception.

Uptime Institute Professional Services VP Vince Renaud and Consultant Matt Mescall will be at Uptime Symposium 2012 to present the findings of the latest Data Center Density Report. They will analyze this year’s report as well as trends from previous years and discuss what it all means for the data center industry.

This is an overview of a session that will be presented at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2012. Click here to register.

In 2009, Deutsche Bank announced its commitment to achieving an unprecedented level of environmental sustainability in its IT operations. Among the objectives included in the bank’s eight-step program were overhauling its computing infrastructure with the latest hardware; neutralizing its carbon footprint; and achieving four times the energy efficiency in its data centers. As part of Deutsche Bank’s green data center strategy, the organization took a step that was considered both innovative and remarkably risky when it chose to use outside air for free cooling in a mission-critical data center – a move that was basically uncharted territory for the traditionally conservative banking industry.

But fast forward to the present day, and the efforts are already paying off. Last year, the bank met its data center energy-efficiency goal one year ahead of schedule. And in January 2011, Deutsche Bank opened its Eco Data Center in the New York City area, which uses air-side economization to provide free cooling. In a video from last year’s Uptime Institute Symposium, Deutsche Bank chief scientist Andrew Stokes describes how the organization had to contend with the risks of running mission-critical workloads during major infrastructure changes that had never before been attempted in the field.

Stokes will return to this year’s Uptime Symposium to share key lessons Deutsche Bank learned in its first year operating the Eco Data Center. Find out how air-side economization and evaporative cooling, often considered appropriate only for test and dev, effectively handle mission-critical workloads and significantly reduce energy costs for one of the world’s largest financial institutions.
Some of the topic areas Stokes will cover include the following:

• IT equipment performance under varying temperatures;
• data center air flow and room design;
• measuring system-wide efficiency instead of power usage effectiveness;
• system tuning and optimization;
• and the realities of air-side economization and free air cooling in the New York City climate.

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL — At the inaugural Uptime Institute Brazil Network meeting in Sao Paulo this week, a panel of top South American data center design firms answered questions from data center owners and operators on the top trends in the Brazil region.

According to the panelists, modular data center designs are becoming increasingly common in Brazil. The panelists also said Brazil’s data center designs tend to look more like European installations with smaller data center deployments than are typically built in the U.S.

The data center design panel also noted that economization or free cooling is becoming viable in Brazil as data center operators start raising inlet air temperatures. But Brazil’s climate can complicate issues, and mechanical cooling for some part of the year is still necessary.

Below are more photos from this week’s event in Sao Paulo.

A few stats from SearchDataCenter.com’s annual data center survey:

-In 2011, 40% of respondents said that the IT department is responsible for paying the power bill, while 60% do not. The matter of IT departments footing the utility bill is in decline from 2010, where 47% of IT departments paid for power and 53% did not.

-In 2011, 51% of IT professionals reported using ducted or plenum containment to control air flow in the data center, 43% use hot-aisle containment and 39% use cold-aisle containment. These findings are similar to 2010 results, except for a slight uptick in 2011 in ducted and cold-aisle containment use. There was also a small decline in the use of hot-aisle containment.

-In 2011, 54% of IT respondents reported using raised floors, while 40% deployed slab floor. This is a notable change from 2010 where 58% of IT professionals used raised flooring and 33% used slab flooring.