The Uptime Institute provides education, publications, consulting, certifications, conferences and seminars, independent research, and thought leadership for the enterprise data center industry and for data center professionals.
Founded in 1993, the Institute pioneered the creation and facilitation of end-user knowledge communities to improve reliability and uninterruptible availability—uptime—in data center facilities and Information Technology organizations. Today, the 100-plus members of the Institute’s global Site Uptime Networks® are mostly Fortune 100-sized companies having multiple data centers averaging 50,000 square feet of computer room area and consuming six megawatts of utility power. Members learn from each other and from the Institute via closed members-only conferences, site tours, benchmarking programs, best-practice sharing, abnormal incident collection, FLASH Reports, and shared metrics.
Institute research focuses on data center facilities, the IT and facilities interface, and how both functions affect the cost, reliability and energy consumption of computing. Institute Best Practices arise out of work with the practitioners who actually run data centers, comparative cost and uptime statistics, consulting work, surveys, and internally funded efforts. The Institute makes this detailed knowledge available to companies within the Networks, and provides high-level summaries for individual Institute members and for the broader data center industry in the form of research papers, webinars, and symposia. These publications and events are vendor-neutral.
The Institute has pioneered and continues to develop numerous innovations that subsequently have become industry standards, including hot/cold aisles, site infrastructure energy overhead metrics and measurements, cost modeling, the dual-power specification, and the Tier Classification system for rating the concurrent maintainability and fault tolerance of data center facilities. A recent enhancement to the Tier Classification Standard includes Operational Sustainability, especially critical when data center construction investments exceed $100 million.
More Uptime Institute Activities
• The Institute’s annual international Symposium on Green Enterprise IT, now in its fourth year, presents the latest research findings of the Institute and of the uninterruptible uptime industry. Presentations are made available post-Symposium via webcasts.
• To tackle the emerging issue of data center energy efficiency, the Institute works with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the Green Grid, the US Department of Energy, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and their global counterparts to develop knowledge and programs to reduce facilities and IT energy consumption while maintaining performance and reliability.
• The Institute annually recognizes best-in-class energy efficiency initiatives through the juried Green Enterprise IT Awards and the Global Green 100.
• To improve industry-wide data center availability, the Institute shares and acts on high-level trends from its 4,000-plus Abnormal Incident database of facility “gotchas”. For example, since 2000, the Institute has worked behind the scenes on multiple efforts to modify National Electric Code rules requiring an EPO (Emergency Power Off) at principal data center exits. The most recent reliability enhancement effort is aimed at influencing the 2011 code cycle.
• Another industry collaboration effort has been the successful development of Environmental Performance Criteria for New Data Centers. This was submitted to the US Green Building Council in December of 2008 as a prototype for an eventual data center-specific LEED program.
• The Institute’s portfolio of professional management and engineering consulting services now includes the SAVE Program, a bundled analytics solution to help data center operators benchmark their energy consumption, improve energy efficiency and reclaim hidden facility capacity.
• Individuals, in addition to end-user companies, can now become Institute members and, through the Institute’s interactive services, get early access to Institute research and research papers, help to set future research priorities, and discuss industry trends online with their peer community.
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