New Report Calls for Fast Corporate Action to Curb Escalating Power Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Resulting from Computing

Business Wire, May 2, 2008

McKinsey & Company, with Support from Uptime Institute, Recommends Doubling Data Center Energy Efficiency by 2012

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Please replace the release dated April 30, 2008 with the following corrected version due to revisions to second graph and also to subhead.

The corrected release reads:

NEW REPORT CALLS FOR FAST CORPORATE ACTION TO CURB ESCALATING POWER CONSUMPTION AND GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS RESULTING FROM COMPUTING

McKinsey & Company, with Support from Uptime Institute, Recommends Doubling Data Center Energy Efficiency by 2012

The rapidly increasing demand for digital processing for everything from online banking to e-Bay auctions, Amazon orders, Google searches, and iTunes and YouTube downloads has become part of the global warming story. A new study released today suggests that large-scale computing facilities, or data centers, are a fast-growing contributor to global warming and a drain on corporate profitability. The result of a year-long collaborative study undertaken by global management consultancy McKinsey & Company and data center computing research and corporate advisory firm Uptime Institute, the report, entitled "Revolutionizing Data Center Energy Efficiency--Key Analyses," calls for an immediate overhaul of corporate management practices and a doubling of the energy efficiency of large-scale corporate computing facilities by 2012.

Recommendations by the report's author, McKinsey & Company, with strong support from Uptime Institute, were made at the Institute's Symposium 2008: Green Enterprise Computing in Orlando. The Symposium is a global gathering of more than 400 concerned corporate executives, engineers and scientists, and representatives of the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program. The report makes three primary recommendations which could help corporations double the energy efficiency of data- and network-center computing.

An average data center today consumes energy equivalent to that used by 25,000 American homes, and as a whole, the energy consumption in data centers is almost .5 percent of world production. For many industries, data centers are one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. If current trends continue unchecked, data center greenhouse gas emissions will quadruple by 2020.

"While the design of the next generation of 'green' data centers gets a lot of attention and is certainly a worthwhile pursuit, we're putting forward the case in this report that improving efficiency in existing sites will lower energy usage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions faster and more significantly with less cost," said Kenneth G. Brill, founder and executive director of Uptime Institute.

To improve energy efficiency in large-scale corporate data centers, the report recommends the following three solutions:

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To achieve the recommended doubling of energy efficiency, McKinsey and Uptime suggest that equipment manufacturers and industry groups establish uniform metrics, along the lines of the metrics used for automobile fuel consumption, that will measure the individual and combined energy efficiency of corporate, public-sector- and third-party-hosted data centers.

The report was released at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2008: Green Enterprise Computing in Orlando. Podcasts of the Symposium proceedings, keynote speeches and the presentation of the report by William Forrest and Ken Brill will be made available over the next three weeks at http://uptimeinstitute.org.

About the Uptime Institute

The Uptime Institute (http://uptimeinstitute.org/) is a leading independent research, corporate advisory, knowledge exchange, education and professional services provider serving the owners/operators of enterprise data centers. Our primary area of expertise, as the name implies, is the uptime availability, reliability, and resiliency of enterprise computing within formal critical computing environments, i.e. computer rooms, server farms and ranches, and data centers. The Institute operates a private knowledge network, the Site Uptime Network that conducts research, benchmarking, knowledge-sharing, and best practices for its members who represent 100 of the largest data center owning/operating institutions in the world. Our intellectual property base includes the de facto industry standard for data center design known as the Tiers Classification System and the Four Metrics for Determining a Green Data Center.