Fortune Data Centers CEO John Sheputis discusses his company’s experience as an early adopter of Uptime Institute’s Management and Operations (M&O) Stamp of Approval, a third party validation of data center operational excellence.

Human error is the leading cause of data center downtime. Poor operations practices can defeat the most resilient data center design. Uptime Institute addressed this issue by forming a coalition of leading data center owners and operators. The M&O Coalition ratified a set of industry-wide operational practices that became the M&O Stamp of approval.

For more information: Uptime Institute M&O Stamp.

Family owned Central-Oregon cable company BendBroadband only recently decided to get into the data center business, but in that short time the organization has quickly proven it wants to be a leader in the industry.

The company earned Uptime Institute Tier III Facility Certification, and was the first site to be certified with a Kyoto Cooling system. In fact, the BendBroadband Vault is one of the biggest Kyoto Cooling installations in North America.

BendBroadband was also awarded the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Gold status, under the LEED 2009 Building Design and Construction (LEED BD+C) rating system. From the BendBroadband blog: This is a monumental achievement and one that we have been working toward since the initial concept stage of the Vault. This certification puts us in the upper echelon of data centers and makes us only the 5th data center in the world to attain this level.

BendBroadband is also an early adopter of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software. The company recently announced it is using nlyte software for capacity planning.

I spoke with Steven Hall, Data Center Director at BendBroadband about the company’s DCIM use. Hall uses nlyte to help the organization bring new customers into the data center. Clients provide BendBroadband with a list of the servers they want to deploy, and Hall plugs those models into nlyte to plan out how much space, power and cooling will be necessary to meet the workload, and offers various options for deploying the equipment.

“We use it as part of our on-boarding process,” Hall said. “We help customers take a quick look at different cabinet layouts. Do they need a high density cabinet, or should we spread it out over two cabinets? The tool was perfect for that.”

Uptime Institute EMEA Network Director Mark Acton discusses Uptime Institute’s endorsement of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres in this video.

Uptime Institute and The 451 Group will be participating in BrightTALK’s Green Week, kicking off Apr 18 2011. This virtual conference will kick off Monday and bring together leaders from business, government, academia and the law will converge to discuss the best ways to capitalize on the movement toward sustainable business practices. Uptime Institute’s Tony Ulichnie and Mark Acton will be participating, along with The 451 Group Eco-Efficient IT analysts Andy Lawrence, John Stanley and Andrew Donoghue. Topics include carbon management in the data center, PC power management, and data center efficiency metrics.

Uptime Institute VP Julian Kudritzki spoke yesterday on a Webinar about Uptime Institute Tier Certification, hosted by Mission Critical Magazine. You can listen to the archived Webinar here.

What is an Uptime Institute Tier Certification? Why would an organization choose to Certify its data center? What are the common myths and misconceptions around Uptime Institute tier Certification? Find out in this free webinar. It’s easy to register.

U.S. Bank, a Tier IV Certification owner, discusses the organization’s reasons for Certifying with Uptime Institute. “The Certification process is a little stressful, since we’re the conduit between the data center design, construction and financial groups. But it allowed us to sit down as an organization and understand our needs. A lot of us think we know our organization’s needs and expansion plans will look like, but until you get some expertise in the room and get the team together, it’s amazing what you find out that you did not know. We had a lot of discussions about where we wanted to be at the end of the project. I had to make sure the data center would meet the needs of the organization today, and would meet our needs for the next five years.”