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.”

Five years ago the data center industry faced a crisis: Data centers were running out of capacity, the mechanical infrastructure couldn’t handle the widespread and rapid shift to high-density hardware, and minimally utilized servers sprawled out of control.

And bigger challenges loomed on the horizon: Scarcity of cheap power, pending regulation, and increased public scrutiny of data center energy use.

The first respondents to this crisis demonstrated that data center design and operations could evolve significantly to meet those challenges.

The first respondents also developed best practices and metrics for measuring energy efficiency. Server virtualization has been widely implemented, improving IT utilization. Forward-thinking data center managers have become better stewards of their companies’ resources, and the planet’s.

Today, Facebook has 100,000 users demanding its data centers unfriend coal after news broke that the social media giant had chosen a utility provider with primarily coal-based power generation. Our discussions with one of the world’s top banks reveals heightened sensitivity in that industry to the public relations impacts, and business consequences, of energy use in the data centers.

For many companies, green is a competitive differentiator driving data center consolidation efforts, closer scrutiny of IT capacity management, and efficiency-minded engineering solutions. Other companies are running out of data center space while they’re still dragging themselves out of the economic crisis.

Ignoring data center efficiency is no longer an option.

The tools and best practices are available for data center owners and operators to wring every drop out of existing data center assets, and to design new data centers in the most cost- and energy-efficient manner possible.

Actionable advice, low-cost improvements, self-funding projects

For the past several years, Uptime Institute has developed a body of knowledge for data center owners and operators to improve data center efficiency. Many of these time honored best practices haven’t changed, nor require significant investment.

Uptime Institute recommends all data center owners and operators take a staged approach to energy efficiency. Starting with low-cost, low-risk efficiency improvements—data center managers can reap huge savings from existing facilities without any new or expensive techno-fixes.

The following documents provide actionable advice for data center managers to get started:

-IT and Facilities Initiatives for Improved Data Center Efficiency: Ten initiatives for data center operators to reduce energy-related capital expenses across facility and IT systems.

-How to Meet “24 by Forever” Cooling Demands of Your Data Center: 27 data center cooling best practices to improve reliability and efficiency.

-The Invisible Crisis in the Data Center — The Economic Meltdown of Moore’s Law: Provides economic argument for improving data center efficiency, and recommendations for achieving those goals.

The next step: Integrating IT and data center operations

Data center facilities managers and executives have led the first charge to improve data center energy efficiency. Future improvements in data center efficiency will depend on incentivizing IT practitioners to take the next steps.

IT operations staff can drive exponential improvements in data center efficiency and effectiveness. IT organizations that are willing to take a systematic approach, starting at the application and data layers – consolidating applications and servers, de-duplicating data, removing comatose but power-draining servers, building redundancy into the applications and IT architecture rather than physical systems — will drive the next wave of efficiency gains.

The following documents provide advice for integrating data center facilities and IT operations teams:

Data Center Energy Efficiency and Productivity: An introduction of the concept of the Integrated Critical Environments Team, plus five self-funding short-term initiatives to improve data center efficiency.

-ITIL — How to Manage the Coming Convergence of IT and Facilities: Using the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework to create an integrated IT and Facilities team.

Uptime Institute’s role and publication plan going forward

Over the past five years, the data center industry has coalesced around new standards, best practices, metrics and recognition programs. Uptime Institute has partnered with industry standards bodies, and will provide technical advice, an industry test bed and global perspective on these standards, best practices and metrics.

Drawing on the expertise of its Network, staff of distinguished engineers, body of intellectual property and the hundreds of Uptime Institute Accredited Tier Specialists and Accredited Tier Designers around the globe, Uptime will deliver publications to help data center owners and operators evaluate and implement data center efficiency metrics, best practices and recognition programs.

Look for new step-by-step data center efficiency guidance in the coming months for Uptime Institute Members. Also, the Uptime Institute will be serving as a test-bed for industry standards in development. This will work to ensure that the owner’s perspective is incorporated into the development process and that the methodologies are proved in real-life, real-world operational data centers.