Sun Microsystems, AOL, UPS, NetApp, Bank of Montreal, HP and Nationwide Mutual Insurance Named...

...Data Center Energy Efficiency Pioneers

Green Enterprise IT Awards from Uptime Institute Recognize Outstanding Initiatives

ORLANDO, Fla. - 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.

Co-sponsored by Deloitte Consulting, the 2008 Green Enterprise IT Awards winners are:


* Sun Microsystems: Energy Efficient IT Hardware Deployment
* UPS: Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (power and cooling) Overhead
* AOL LLC: Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (power and cooling) Overhead
* NetApp: IT Hardware Asset Utilization
* Bank of Montreal: IT Hardware Asset Utilization
* Nationwide Mutual Insurance: IT Strategy
* Hewlett Packard: IT Strategy
* Hewlett Packard: Green IT Beyond the Data Center

2008 Green Enterprise IT Best-in-Class Finalists are:


* Office Depot: Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (power and cooling) Overhead
* Intel: Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (power and cooling) Overhead
* Interior Health Authority of British Columbia: IT Hardware Asset Utilization
* Hannaford Bros: IT Strategy
* Nationwide Mutual Insurance: Green IT Beyond the Data Center

“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.

Nationwide Mutual Insurance

IT Strategy - Innovation

Like many IT organizations, Nationwide Service Company, a wholly owned affiliate of Nationwide Insurance Company, recognized the need to reduce the soaring cost of its IT expenses. With growth projections that would add more than 500 servers per year, we set out on a mission to consolidate and virtualize our distributed server environment that numbered more than 4500 devices. The impact of this effort went far beyond the initial capital cost of server equipment to include the people, resource, and complexity cost to manage a sprawling environment and equally importantly to delay the need to build a new data center. While our problem was common, our approach offered a blend of technological innovation and a change in our application development strategy that enabled an integrated approach to reaching our infrastructure goals.

Hewlett Packard

IT Strategy - Implementation

In 2005, Hewlett Packard’s Global Information Technology function began a three-year transformation program of unprecedented scale. It included building six new, next generation data centers to replace more than 85 legacy locations that were greater than 5,000 square feet, plus hundreds of smaller server locations. It also included rebuilding the company’s global telecommunications infrastructure; implementing a consistent set of technology standards; consolidating and modernizing applications; and improving the governance process to better align IT with HP corporate priorities. The speed with which the program was tackled—three years—is a part of the innovative, unique approach by senior management. During the transformation program HP reduced the IT application portfolio from more than 6,000 applications to 1,600 through consolidation and retirement effort. The legacy environment had approximately 23,000 servers installed with an average age of seven years. As HP completes transformation it is reducing this to less than 14,000 new servers, bringing benefits in energy efficiency, reliability and improved density.

Hewlett Packard

Green IT Beyond the Data Center – Implementation

The environmental benefits of the transformation underway within HP IT contribute to the overall sustainability goals for the company. For example, the reduction in internal data centers supporting the company from more than 85 to pairs of next generation data centers in three metro areas is reducing energy consumption for HP IT by 60 percent. HP has also integrated energy efficiency into products from desktop to data center to enable customers to conserve energy, reuse and recycle disposed products and replace existing devices with more energy efficient ones.

Hewlett Packard

Green IT Beyond the Data Center - Innovation

As part of its longtime commitment to the environment, HP is tapping into the benefits of renewable energy to power its San Diego facility. In 2008, HP is implementing a large-scale, 6,000 solar power panel installation that will provide 1.2-megawatts of solar energy, enough to provide more than 10 percent of HP’s energy use at the facility. This is part of HP’s comprehensive climate change strategy to reduce its energy consumption to 25 percent below the 2005 levels. With the cost of powering technology increasingly outpacing the cost of the technology itself, HP’s incorporation of solar power shows that environmentally friendly solutions make sound business sense while minimizing the effects on the environment. The innovative financial agreement requires no upfront capital investment by HP and provides solar power at guaranteed buyback rates.

For more information on the Green Enterprise IT Awards, click here: http://uptimeinstitute.org/content/view/106/114/

For more information on the Symposium, click here: http://uptimeinstitute.org/symposium

About the Uptime Institute
The Uptime Institute (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.