Every year Uptime Institute hosts the Green Enterprise IT (GEIT) Awards, an international competition that recognizes projects, ideas and products that improve energy productivity and resource use in IT. Although the categories in which the Institute grants Awards may change each year, the objectives remain the same: to educate the data center and IT industries in effective ways to reduce energy consumption by shining a spotlight on innovation and best practice. Through the GEIT program, we want to recognize and support change agents who lead by example.

GEIT is no popularity contest; our rigorous judging process is designed to select projects that demonstrate groundbreaking ideas that produce quantifiable, high impact results. GEIT applications are evaluated by a panel of independent, expert judges. To insure objective evaluation, applications are reviewed in a double-blind process: judges do not know whose applications they review, and applicants do not know which judges reviewed their application. In addition, the staff ensures that Judges are not allowed to judge any Award category that includes applications from his or her own company.

Another unique feature of the GEIT Awards is the benefits winners and finalists receive: GEIT honorees are provided a platform to share what they’ve learned on the world stage. The Institute offers each winner a 30-minute session at its spring Symposium to present their case study and complimentary registrations so representatives from winning companies can network at Symposium and share what they’ve learned with peers. Finalists, likewise, are provided a free registration and are invited to present a brief overview of their projects. As in all Symposium sessions, GEIT honorees engage in Q&A with delegates after their presentation to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing.

And case briefs and presentations are hosted on the Symposium website for the benefit of the global community. Uptime Institute is proud to present the following nine data center case studies that that significantly improve energy productivity and resource use in IT.

2011 GEIT Award Winner Case Briefs.

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.

In this short video from Uptime Institute Symposium 2011, Chris Malone (Thermal Technologies Architect at Google) discusses the key data center best practices Google uses to drive high energy efficiency, and how to adopt those best practices to improve your own data center’s PUE.

Fix cooling first, it’s the biggest term in your PUE overhead and offers the biggest opportunity for improvement. Do that by managing air flow — separating hot and cold streams. Raise the temperature of the air coming into the rack to make it easier to use economizers.

Second, optimize power distribution scheme by minimizing conversions and using efficient UPS solutions.

Third, measure and improve. Google is currently reporting a 1.16 PUE, and the organization got there by measuring and constantly trying to improve. The typical enterprise data center is likely at a PUE around 2.0, which offers lots of room for improvement.

“These best practices are so simple that everybody should employ them and see good results,” Malone said.

In this keynote panel discussion from Uptime Institute Symposium 2011, leaders from various data center efficiency groups discuss how these organizations could cooperate to improve data center efficiency.

Uptime Institute Executive Director Pitt Turner says we need to do more to drive development and adoption of energy efficiency metrics for IT devices. “We need to have something that’s simple, easy to apply, commonly understood metric for the IT side,” Turner said. “We need to boil it down to a couple of key metrics and start focusing on what is to the left of the decimal point on PUE.”

John Haas from The Green Grid says the data center industry has a target on its back. It’s a big energy user and we hear about it all the time in the public. But data center industry has not been very good at advocating its own successes, like driving GDP and digitizing resource intensive business practices.

Give us your take. What are the initiatives you’d like to see driven by the data center industry groups?

In this video filmed at Uptime Institute Symposium 2011, Uptime Institute Executive Director Pitt Turner interviews Deutsche Bank Chief Infrastructure Architect Andrew Stokes about his organization’s decision to use 100% outside air cooling in a NYC data center. As Pitt points out in this video, the majority of the engineering and technical issues with outside air cooling have been resolved. But how do IT and data center facilities teams get the management approval to move forward from a legacy data center cooling solution to 100% outside air cooling?