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.

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!

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.

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.

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.”

To register click the link.

The sessions will include:
Cloud Computing: How the Global 2000 are Evolving their IT Infrastructure presented by Ken Male of TheInfoPro

The Digital Convergence of IT Infrastructure presented by Steve Carter of the Uptime Institute

Contact Anton Hios

for further details.

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.”

Read the piece here.

Seidman’s previous jobs include deploying modular data center products for HP, developing data center utility rebate programs with Xcel Energy, and over twenty years experience as a facility project manager and operations engineer.

Modular data center experience: Seidman’s role at HP was liaison between HP and customers, making sure the customer had the appropriate infrastructure in place before the Pod arrived. She also oversaw start-up, commissioning and turn-over processes.

Seidman said modular data centers (prefab units delivered on site) allow companies to roll out a staged deployment, a piece at a time. It’s quicker than traditional construction, and there can be cost advantages.

On the other hand, Seidman said brick and mortar data centers allow for more design flexibility, and that some geographic locations may have long term permit issues with regard to prefab structures for aesthetic reasons.

“I don’t think we’ll see the entire data center market going modular, Seidman said. “It’s adaptable, compact, and can be less expensive in upfront costs. But you can’t just plug these things in, you need to ensure the infrastructure is in place.”

At Xcel Energy, Seidman was responsible for driving data center adoption of demand-side energy efficiency rebates. One of the objectives of the program was to drive cooperation between facilities and IT departments.

Energy efficient IT equipment, efficient server power supplies, server virtualization software, or energy efficient UPS systems all cost more money upfront. Seidman said there is a payback over time, but companies don’t always analyze the total cost of ownership. So utilities step in to encourage implementing more efficient equipment.

“Energy efficient rebate money is available, it’s up to the owners to pursue it,” Seidman said. “Data center operators are risk averse people, and trying something new takes additional time and work. A rebate can bring the costs down, but it takes more effort than a standard design. But people should know about their utility’s rebate programs. It’s available to them as a rate payer.”

Uptime Institute is proud to welcome Debbie Seidman to the team.

So get out from behind that desk and saddle up. It’s time to bring in those little doggies holed up in a server closet, sitting idle on the raised floor, wasting power and cooling resources. Based upon our field experience, up to 10% of those servers in your racks aren’t doing anything.

We recently heard of a major enterprise data center in New Zealand, fine cattle country by the way, that removed 20% of its servers that were sitting comatose.

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.

Instead of piddling around shaving a point off your PUE, it’s time to get focused on what will make a real difference. It takes hard work to get in there and look for duplicated or unused applications, out-of-date, obsolete servers. We need you to drive in those wobbly old steer and replace them with more efficient, virtualized hardware.

Uptime Institute is offering a reward (or a bounty) on your obsolete machines. All participants in the Uptime Institute Server Roundup will receive a T-shirt and a badge for their web sites. Winners in each category will receive a commemorative rodeo belt buckle to proudly display on their corporate trophy rooms, desks—or if so bold—on their belts. The winners will also receive free passes and a dedicated presentation slot at Uptime Institute Symposium, May 13-17, 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif.

The rules: Two winners will be determined, one for most IT equipment removed, one for largest percentage of IT equipment removed. We don’t care how you get there. Going virtual? Server consolidation? Moving to the cloud? Going out of business?! We don’t care. Just unplug and decommission those machines.

Paperwork: What’s the proof? We want to see a paper trail. Send us change records. Do you Identify machines by server name or serial number. Removed 752 servers? We want to see the submittal of the work. Did you send the hardware to a recycler? Send us the receipt.

Results: We want to know how much energy you saved. Send us the UPS output reading before the change and after the change. You can do it right in the flow of work.

Photos: Send us a few before and after photos. Servers in the cabinets, servers in the docks going out. It doesn’t have to be exhaustive. Extra credit for creativity.

Submit your documents for inspection to Uptime Institute’s Hank Seader (hseader@uptimeinstitute.com). Also send any comments, questions, cowboy jokes. Thanks for your interest. Hike up your Wranglers, unhitch your horses, and get to work.

Deadline: Contest closes Feb 1st, 2012.