Response to the Inaugural Uptime Institute Server Roundup Contest has been great so far, with teams signing up from around the world to participate. The goal of the event is to remove obsolete servers, save energy, and save money. 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.

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.

Howdy partners. We’re pleased to announce the first Uptime Institute Server Roundup. A roundup, according to Merriam-Webster, is the act or process of collecting animals (cattle) by riding around them and driving them in; a gathering in of scattered persons or things.

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 It takes hard work to get in there and look for duplicated or unused applications, out-of-date, obsolete servers.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.

NASA Chief Technology Officer Chris Kemp is piloting the space agency’s IT operations into the 21st century. Charged with reducing data center greenhouse gas emissions 30% by 2020, under executive order 13514, Kemp and his crew must quantify and execute on this goal.

Photo U.S. Army

NASA spends almost two billion per year on IT infrastructure, with over 50 large data centers, and many hundreds of server closets and server rooms. Just getting baseline info on the as-is state of NASA’s data center footprint would be a huge challenge.

How can NASA shrink its data center’s carbon footprint if it doesn’t even have a starting point? Kemp decided to deploy energy monitoring software across all of the agency’s data centers to get a picture of that as-is energy footprint, and identify areas for consolidation and improvement.