(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Data center research firm The Uptime Institute (www.uptimeinstitute.org) and US Department of Energy (www.energy.gov), announced on Wednesday the winners of the Green Enterprise IT Awards, which honors companies that have made significant green achievements in reducing energy consumption in their data centers.
First introduced by the Uptime Institute last year, the GEIT Awards program help develop an institutional awareness that IT energy efficiency can lower operating costs and the overall corporate carbon footprint.
Held as part of the 4th Annual Institute Research Symposium: LEAN, CLEAN, and GREEN, the GEIT Awards ceremony will take place on Wednesday, 6:00 p.m., at the Hilton New York.
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman will deliver the keynote address at the awards ceremony.
Uptime will also formally acknowledge the companies that make up The Global Green 100 List, which highlights the “green” efforts of companies, at the ceremony.
The 2009 GEIT Awards winners include AOL’s Enterprise-Wide Data Center Optimization Project for the “Data Center Energy Efficiency Improvement: IT” award.
MassMutual Financial Group’s Green IT Initiatives won the award for “Data Center Energy Efficiency Improvement: Joint IT and Facilities”.
The “Data Center Facility Design” award went to eNation Corporation’s Integrated Design of Green High-Density Data Center, while Verai Systems won best Energy Efficient Products: Facilties for its Containerized Green Data Center Technology.
APC by Schneider Electric won in the category of “Energy Efficient Products: IT” for its InRow Products with Active Response Controls & Integrated Thermal Containment.
The University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing won the award for “Green IT Beyond the Data Center” for its achievements in Grid Heating Clusters.
Finally, UniCredit Group won the award for “Data Center Energy Efficiency Improvement: Facilities” for its work on Free Cooling in Munich Data Center.
“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,” says Kenneth G. Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute. “With the GEIT Awards, industry has a valuable opportunity to highlight excellence and learn from each other’s successes.”
The winners were decided by two rounds of judging. In the first round, each application is read and scored by individual reviewers based on the evaluation criteria.
Those applicants that receive the highest scores in each subclass will then proceed to the next round of judging, which is reviewed by a committee of judges.
The entire judging process is anonymous with the identities of the applicant organizations kept hidden from the reviewers, while the applicants are not told the identities of the individual judges reviewing their application.
Additionally, judges are disqualified from judging their own company submission.
There are judged in six key categories, including New Knowledge, which accounts for 25 percent of the total score; Impact, which accounts for 25 percent; Knowledge Transferability, which accounts for 20 percent; Measurability, which accounts for 15 percent; Audaciousness of the Goal, which accounts for 10 percent; and Business Plan Integration, which accounts for 5 percent.
