Uptime, DOE announce GEIT award winners

The Uptime Institute and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), announced the winners of the Green Enterprise IT Awards (GEIT), which honors companies that have made significant strides in creating reliable, sustainable and energy-efficient data centers.

The winners were announced at the 4th Annual Institute Research Symposium: LEAN, CLEAN and GREEN in New York City.

Thomas L. Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and best-selling author, delivered the keynote address at tonightÂ’s awards ceremony.

The 2009 GEIT Awards winners are:

• Data Center Energy Efficiency Improvement: IT

• AOL: AOL Enterprise-Wide Data Center Optimization Project

• Data Center Energy Efficiency Improvement: Joint IT and Facilities

• MassMutual Financial Group: MassMutual “Green IT Initiatives”

• Data Center Facility Design

• eNation Corporation: Integrated Design of Green High-Density Data Center

• Energy Efficient Products: Facilities

• Verari Systems: Containerized Green Data Center Technology

• Energy Efficient Products: IT

• APC by Schneider Electric: InRow Products with Active Response Controls & Integrated Thermal Containment

• Green IT Beyond the Data Center

• University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing: Grid Heating Clusters

• Data Center Energy Efficiency Improvement: Facilities

• UniCredit Group: Free Cooling in Munich Data Center

The 2009 GEIT Awards program honors organizations that have distinguished themselves through innovative models for reducing energy consumption in their data centers. GEIT Awards winners have gone beyond instituting established industry best practices to implementing cutting-edge green IT systems. The Institute introduced the GEIT Awards program in 2008 to create institutional awareness that IT energy efficiency can enhance bottom-line profitability, while meaningfully reducing the overall corporate carbon footprint.

“As rapidly growing data center energy consumption impedes our economy, the national energy supply, security and the environment, it is crucial that we emphasize awareness of this challenge and encourage the industry to come together to solve it,” said Kenneth G. Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute, a Santa Fe, N.M.-based research think-tank and advisory to owners and operators of the world's largest enterprise data centers on the technical and business issues of computing reliability, sustainability and energy efficiency. “With the GEIT Awards, industry has a valuable opportunity to highlight excellence and learn from each other’s successes.”

At the Symposium, winning companies presented case studies of their successful initiatives in data center energy efficiency, thus encouraging their peers to be advocates of change in their own organizations.