Uptime Institute Now Accepting Entries for the Green Enterprise IT Awards 2009

Business Wire, Sept 24, 2008

McKinsey & Company and U.S. Department of Energy Partner With Institute in Honoring Data Center Energy Efficiency Pioneers

SANTA FE, N.M. -- Uptime Institute (www.uptimeinstitute.org), today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy and global strategic consultancy McKinsey & Company are partnering with the Institute for this year's Green Enterprise IT Awards program. The GEIT Awards promote and celebrate those innovative strategies and proven best practices for significantly reducing enterprise IT and data center energy consumption.

The Institute is a leading corporate advisory on the economic, business and technology issues related to critical computing environment operational reliability and energy efficiency. In most large corporate organizations, enterprise computing and data centers are the largest consumers of electric power. The unprecedented rapid growth in the power demand of computing has reached near crisis proportions, both for individual companies and for regional power grids. The Institute is at the forefront of educating corporate executives on the scale and seriousness of this crisis and efficiency improvement management actions that need to be taken so that the uptime reliability of mission-critical computing is not interrupted. The 2008 GEIT Award Winners exemplify the innovation of organizations and professionals throughout the industry responding to the IT energy challenge. Visit www.uptimeinstitute.org/green08 to learn more about the 2008 winners, including UPS, Office Depot, and Sun Microsystems.

2009 Award honorees and winners will be announced at the 4th Annual Uptime Institute Research Symposium: LEAN, CLEAN, and GREEN, the Global Energy Future of Enterprise IT and the Data Center, in New York City, April 13-16, 2009, at the Hilton New York (www.uptimeinstitute.org/symposium). The annual Symposium tackles economic, strategic and operational hurdles and develops industry benchmarks for improving energy efficiency in data centers.

Honoree companies will present the peer-reviewed case-study papers on their winning initiatives as a key component of the symposium formal program. The purpose of these sessions, according to Institute Executive Director Ken Brill, "is to encourage their industry peers to be champions of change within their own organizations." The GEIT Awards judging criteria are specifically designed to select projects with potential to serve as models of the realistic feasibility and measureable impact of aggressive energy efficiency initiatives. Winners' case studies will be featured in Podcasts and white papers to be posted at uptimeinstitute.org.

This year, the Institute expands its program scope to include both IT productivity improvement ("lean"), clean renewable energy alternatives and electronics, and green buildings. More than 200 (of the planned-for 800-plus) executives and senior IT and data center professionals from among the world's largest operators of critical computing facilities have already registered for the Symposium, including Bank of Montreal, Capital One, Coca-Cola, Dell, eBay, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, NetApp, Reed Elsevier, State Farm Insurance, Target, Visa and Walt Disney Animation Studios. To see who by title and company have now registered visit www.uptimeinstitute.org/delegates.> New to this year's GEIT Awards program, the "Uptime Institute Green 100" will recognize the top Fortune 500 and InformationWeek 500 companies with a board-level policy or governance commitment to eco-sustainability, energy efficiency and carbon footprint reduction. To qualify, a company must have named a senior executive as the program director, and there must be a detailed strategy and plan that is being actively implemented, corporately, that specifically includes enterprise IT and data centers. These companies will be publicly acknowledged by the Institute and will be invited to submit papers detailing progress that they have made in their IT-side carbon-footprint-reduction efforts. Those that are the most mature in their programs will be invited to submit applications for both the Green Enterprise IT and the U.S. Department of Energy awards.

Last year's Green Enterprise IT Awards winners included AOL, Hewlett Packard, Nationwide Mutual Insurance, NetApp, Office Depot, Sun Microsystems and UPS.

To apply for the Green Enterprise IT Awards and to learn more about award benefits visit: uptimeinstitute.org/green09.

To register for the 4th Annual Uptime Institute Research Symposium: LEAN, CLEAN, and GREEN, visit: uptimeinstitute.org/symposium.

Current Premier Symposium Research Underwriters: HP, IBM, APC, Johnson Controls and EDSA. To see all underwriters as of this date visit www.uptimeinstitute.org/underwriters.> Current Media Partners include:

Forbes.com, TechTarget SearchDataCenter.com, Mission Critical Magazine, Data Center Journal

More About the Uptime Institute:

Uptime Institute, inc. (uptimeinstitute.org) is a leading independent research, corporate advisory, knowledge exchange, education and professional services provider serving the owners/operators of enterprise data centers. Institute primary area of expertise is the uptime availability, reliability, resiliency, energy efficiency of enterprise computing within formal critical environments, i.e. computer rooms, server farms, and data centers. The Institute operates a private knowledge community, 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 from around 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.

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