Innovation in the Data Centre 2009

I was lucky enough to once again be chair of the judges for the Data Center Dynamics annual data centre leaders awards. Fourteen categories and over 120 entrants this year made it a major commitment for the judges to review and recommend short lists and finally winners.

As I said to the audience on the night of the award ceremony, the entrants this year stunned me. The level of innovation was right up there where it should be to my mind. Not surprisingly energy efficiency was pretty much top of everyone's agenda and even the normally ultra-conservative businesses were pushing out the boat.

I think the industry is finally realising that the increasing complexity driven not in small part due to the success of the Uptime Institutes Tier ratings and the visibility they have been gaining at C level, is not a healthy thing.

Tier IV costs lots of money. More importantly it also increases the complexity of the systems and despite our best efforts to automate and control these, much still relies on human input and knowledge. I'm sure more issues are created by human error now than equipment failure within Tier III and Tier IV data centres.

Anyway, back to the energy efficiency. Firstly there I don't think there has been a data centre built this year without an economiser of some sorts being used within the design. If you're one of those that didn't use one, SHAME ON YOU!

Even the big boys, HP, Microsoft and others have switched over to fresh-air based systems. Moving away from the need to run chillers constantly. They all still have chillers installed for the day they have to close the external air intakes due to air quality or airborne pollutants (smoke from local fire, etc), but the chillers sit switched off waiting for the day they are needed.

Many are using direct air-side economisers or fresh air cooling as it's more commonly known. Others I've seen are indirect water, direct water, and in-direct air. I also saw an entrant who has built the first data centre powered entirely from renewable energy (so it's actually zero carbon!), they were using bio-crops and bio-digester to create their source of energy. It's in the UK too!

So despite the amount of time I spent reading ALL the entries and then helping DCD review the short-list, plan the presentation and finalists day the time spent was well worth it.

The winners were:

Michael Tobin, TelecityGroup CEO received the Data Centre Business Leader of the Year award.

IBM Fellow Dr. Roger Schmidt collected the Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Industry

Tom Kingham of Red Engineering was named Young Mission Critical Engineer of the Year.

Award: Future Thinking and Design Concepts
Winner: Infinity ONE

Award: Innovation in the Micro Data Centre
Winner: Bristol City Council

Award: Innovation in the Medium Data Centre
Winner: Petroleum Geo - Services

Award: Innovation in the Mega Data Centre
Winner: Microsoft

Award: Leadership in the Public Sector
Winner: Sanctuary Group

Award: Innovation in an Outsourced Environment
Winner: ControlCircle

Award: The 'Green' Data Centre
Winner: Custodian Data Centre

Award: Improved Data Centre Energy Efficiency
Winner: Morgan Stanley

Award: Data Centre Transformation
Winner: Fujitsu

Award: Data Centre Operational Team of the Year
Winner: Computacenter

Award: The Wildcard Award
Winner: TelecityGroup France