The Silicon Valley Leadership Group held its 2nd Data Center Energy Summit on October 15, 2009, at the NetApp corporate offices in California. Organizers reported more than 400 attendees at the event.

Deborah Grove, principal at Grove Associates played a background role in the Summit, participating in the leadership team that has met since January to bring the case studies to completion and created the public relations strategy for the SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit. She also covered the event forMission Critical.

KC Mares of Megawatt Consulting and co-chair of this event said, “Worldwide, we spend $23 billion as an industry on data center industry annually. Last year’s pilots resulted in an average of 56 percent ROI for end users. Our goal is to chop away at those huge numbers with our case studies.”

Zen Kishimoto, PhD principal analyst, Green IT at AltaTera Research Network edited the case studies presented at the event. He said, “Like the last year, we had a lot of participation and many excellent results. We have fewer completed case studies than last year but will have several additional ones coming soon. One of the studies that attracted my attention was done by Power Assure. It proved the reduction of power consumption by IT gear can be achieved via hardware refresh and dynamic power management.”

A second pilot conducted at an Intel data center appeared to be the first attempt to link the condition of IT gear to the building management system

In addition, Joe Miller, Net App’s site operations manager in Raleigh-Durham, NC, presented a case history. Other presenters discussed energy-efficiency projects conducted at Oracle, Stanford, and Pixar.