The Heartland GreenUp IT Symposium & Expo

The Heartland GreenUp IT Symposium and Expo will be held May 4-5th, 2010 in Des Moines, Iowa to promote awareness of and best practices in reducing overall energy consumption and carbon footprints in information technology.

Hewlett Packard Executive Vice President and CIO Randy Mott will keynote the 2 day event. Other keynote speakers include Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar at Google; Andrew Fanara, ENERGY STAR Product Specifications Team Leader at the EPA; and Simon Mingay, Research Vice President at Gartner Research,

Breakout sessions will explore Green Computing, Alternative Energy Solutions, Public and Private Green IT Initiatives, and Technology’s Future Impact on Society in 2020.

The Technology Association of Iowa is also enabling virtual attendance through a fully-immersive, 3D convention center in Second Life. Early bird registration is available through April 1st.  Complete details and registration can be found on the event web site:  www.theheartlandgreenup.com

Photo Gallery: Scenes From Data Center World

More than 200 vendors had booths at Data Center World 2010.

Couldn’t make it to AFCOM’s Data Center World Spring 2010 conference last week? We’ve brought the show to you with our Scenes from Data Center World 2010 gallery featuring five pages of photos of action from the expo floor in Nashville. You can also check out our coverage of the keynote by Brian Lillie of Equinix, along with our video interviews with Emerson Network Power and Lee Technologies. Stay tuned for more DCW coverage to come this week.

How Fast Can You Build A Server?

The SxSW (South by Southwest) conference is underway in Austin, and the team from The Planet have added some interactivity to the company’s booth on the trade show floor with The Planet Server Challenge. Participants have a deconstructed Pentium4 server sitting on a table in front of them, and the objective is to put it back together as quickly as possible. The fastest server builder at the conference will win an ASUS Eee PC netbook. In this 90 second video, The Planet’s Phil Jackson demonstrates the process.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

At DataCenterDynamics New York

On Wednesday (March 3) I’ll be attending DataCenterDynamics New York conference at the New York Hilton. The DCD team says there are more than 1,000 people registered for the show, so it should be a busy event. I’ll be posting updates and observations throughout the day via our @datacenter channel on Twitter (be sure to follow us if you haven’t already). You can also follow all attendee Tweets from the event by searching or following the #dcdnyc2010 hashtag. Not to worry – we’ll also have our usual daily diet of data center stories on Wednesday, plus post-event coverage of the DataCenterDynamics show later this week.

Uptime Seeks Entries for Green IT Awards

The Uptime Institute is accepting applications for its annual Green Enterprise IT (GEIT) Awards, which will be announced at the fifth annual Uptime Institute Symposium, May 17-19 in New York. The Awards are open to submissions from all countries and are judged by a committee of independent experts. The deadline to submit for the GEIT Awards is March 1.

“Now in their third year, the GEIT Awards highlight those companies truly leading innovation in energy efficiency across the globe,” said Andy Lawrence, Research Director, Eco-Efficient IT, at The 451 Group (parent company of Uptime Institute) and Conference Program Director for the Uptime Institute Symposium. “We invite organizations to submit their case studies, to stand alongside previous winners that have set the pace for greener data centers.”

Co-sponsored by Jones Lang LaSalle, the Institute’s 2010 Green Enterprise IT Awards will recognize companies in the following categories:

• Audacious Idea
• IT Innovation
• Beyond the Data Center
• Facilities Innovation
• Data-Center Design
• Outstanding IT Product
• Joint IT/Facilities Innovation
• Outstanding Hosting, Colocation, Cloud or Managed Services
• Outstanding Facilities Product

Winners will be showcased at Symposium 2010 Winners receive a platform to share their experience and insights at the Symposium, as well as significant internal and external recognition through media coverage of the Awards.

Chiller Side Chat Now Available Online

If you missed last Monday’s live “Chiller Side Chat” with Michael Manos of Digital Realty Trust, not to worry. The event was taped, and a recording is now available online at the Digital Realty Knowledge Library. You can hear Mike share his perspectives on a variety of topics, including data center regulation, power distribution and running at warmer temperatures in the data center. It’s free, but there’s a brief registration process.

Reminder: Chiller Side Chat on Dec. 7

I’m hosting another Chiller Side Chat with Michael Manos of Digital Realty Trust on Monday, Dec. 7 from 12 noon to 1 p.m. Central time. Mike is the Senior Vice President of Technical Services for Digital Realty and one of the leading voices in the data center industry. His previous Chiller Side Chats on his Loose Bolts blog have shared his insights on issues ranging from data center design to impending regulation that will affect the data center.

The webinar format of the Chiller Side Chat offers you the opportunity to ask questions and share your thoughts and opinions on key data center issues with Mike, who in his previous post was responsible for the construction and operations of Microsoft’s data center facilities. To get a feel for the format, you can listen to a podcast of the first event on Sept. 14.

Be sure to register for this event to learn more about the changes facing the data center industry and share information and perspectives from Mike and your fellow data center professionals.

Finance & Investment Forum for Data Centres

The 3rd International Finance and Investment Forum for data centres will take place in London on Dec. 3 at King’s Place, and will focus on the emergence of data centres as a new asset class. Panels at the event will examine the financing options for data centres, investment performance and the focus of future investment, a review of market demand and drivers, financing expansion and M&A, the importance of internationalisation in data centre expansion and a special review of Data Centres in Emerging Markets.

Researched and produced by BroadGroup Consulting, the forum brings together data centre owners with investors, financiers, analysts, private equity and law firms. Although Data Centres are holding up relatively well in the slowdown and investment appears to continue from existing players. Speakers at the event will include Harry Beusker (Equinix Europe), Anthony Foy (Interxion), Guy Willner (Teraco South Africa), Steve Wallage (BroadGroup Consulting), Peter Hopper (DH Capital), Mark Lambourne (TREGlobal) and Chris Crosby (Digital Realty Trust).

Gartner: Energy Woes to Worsen in 2010

An April 2009 interactive poll by Gartner on ther usage of emergy metrics found a surprising number of IT professionals that had not yet considered the issue.

The energy, space and technology problems currently facing data center managers are set to worsen in 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. These issues will continue to plague users in 2010, said Gartner, which has framed some of these issues in a new Q&A, Critical Issues Facing Data Center Managers.

“Energy costs are the fastest-rising cost element in the data center portfolio, and yet data center managers are still not paying sufficient attention to the process of measuring, monitoring and modeling energy use in data centers,” said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner. “They need to realize that removing a single x86 server from a data center will result in savings of more than $400 a year in energy costs alone.”

These issues will be a focus of the Gartner Data Center Conference scheduled for Dec. 1-4 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Data Center Knowledge readers can save $400 on their registration by using the priority code DCK when you sign up.