Sun Microsystems, AOL, UPS, NetApp, Bank of Montreal, HP and Nationwide Mutual Insurance Named Data Center Energy Efficiency Pioneers

Business Wire, April 30, 2008

Green Enterprise IT Awards from Uptime Institute Recognize Outstanding Initiatives

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The Uptime Institute, a leading research-based think-tank and corporate advisory on the business and technology issues related to critical computing environment reliability and energy efficiency, today announced winners of its Green Enterprise IT Awards. The awards, which honor organizations that are pioneering energy-efficiency improvements in their data center operations, were presented today in Orlando at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2008: Green Enterprise Computing.

[TABLE OMITTED]
[TABLE OMITTED]

"Realizing that neither business nor the environment can sustain the costs of the increasing energy demands in data centers, the award-winning companies have displayed leadership and innovation in their data center energy efficiency efforts," said Kenneth G. Brill, Institute founder and executive director. "It is our hope that they will serve as a clear example to the world's largest operators of critical computing facilities of the realistic impact and feasibility of these types of initiatives."

At the Symposium, the winning companies presented case studies of their award-winning initiatives in addressing the data center energy efficiency challenge. Through these case studies, winning companies shared their routes to success in order to encourage their industry peers participating in the Symposium to be advocates of change in their own organizations. The awards judging criteria were specifically designed to select projects with potential to serve as business case studies of the realistic impact and feasibility of energy efficiency initiatives. Winners' case studies will be featured in Podcasts and white papers to be posted over the next three weeks at uptimeinstitute.org.

Sun Microsystems

Award category: Energy Efficient IT Hardware Deployment - Implementation

To develop and execute a strategy for improving the efficiency of its technical infrastructure portfolio, Sun created an independent organization, Global Lab & Datacenter Design Services, with the appropriate authority and financing. Sun began the process by characterizing and auditing its technical infrastructure portfolio in order to have a well-quantified starting point from which it could measure improvements. The company was then able to create programs to drive efficiencies, such as the implementation of a model based upon sharing, institute design standards in new data center construction and use hardware replacement as a real estate and energy management strategy. For example, by using hardware replacement to replace its aging equipment with Sun's current generation of energy-efficient servers, Sun was able to achieve more than an 80 percent reduction in square footage and a 60 percent reduction in utility power.

UPS

Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (power and cooling) Overhead - Innovation

UPS undertook a comprehensive data center energy efficiency study that benchmarked its power usage against both internal power consumption and figures reported by others in the industry. The data was used to understand the efficiency of the UPS infrastructure, to calculate annual costs to power and cool the usage or the losses, and finally to identify specific categories in which to reduce energy consumption. Improvements that would provide the greatest returns without compromising reliability were identified and implemented for significant energy savings

AOL LLC

Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (power and cooling) Overhead -Implementation

World-class results may be achieved, not through one 'magic bullet', and indeed perhaps not through 'new knowledge' or new cooling technologies, but rather by careful design and diligent operations and management of all building systems and their components. AOL tracked the components of what people now call the PUE since 2001 (total building load and critical load), and its data shows that since start-up, the centers have operated at world-class standards. World-class PUE is thought to be between 1.8 and 2.0, with some more standard data centers having PUEs of 3.31; AOL demonstrated a consistently achievable PUE of <1.6 through its diligent operations and management practices.

NetApp

IT Hardware Asset Utilization - Implementation

The NetApp approach to fighting rapidly growing power consumption is simple: subtract machines and disks from the power equation by using storage more efficiently. This strategy has many corollary benefits: it lowers complexity, lowers people costs, lowers support and service costs, and improves network efficiency and performance. NetApp's storage consolidation initiative increased storage utilization from less than 40 percent to an average of 60 percent, reduced storage footprint from 24.83 racks to 5.48, reduced the total number of storage systems from 50 to 10, and decreased direct power consumption by 41,184 kWh per month.

Bank of Montreal

IT Hardware Asset Utilization - Innovation

Founded in 1817 as Bank of Montreal, BMO Financial Group is today a highly diversified North American financial services provider. BMO operates and manages in a centralized IT model with the majority of critical processing being consolidated into two large data centers (Tier III and Tier IV), with 15 Tier II greater than 5,000 square feet raised floor environments geographically distributed throughout the world. In early 2004, the BMO capacity planning processes identified a disturbing consumption curve for its core data center facilities. Instead of relying on new data centers scheduled to come online in the near future, BMO initiated a major organizational change to re-align Corporate Real Estate (CRE) and Enterprise Infrastructure (IT) roles and responsibilities. This new organizational structure has enabled BMO to aggressively optimize and continuously improve its IT energy efficiency.