“Uptime Institute’s GEIT Awards provide IT organizations global recognition for reducing energy consumption, and the opportunity to share those strategies and designs with their industry peers,” said Matt Stansberry, director of content and publications for Uptime Institute and program director for Uptime Institute Symposium. “This year we have streamlined the application process, and designed new categories to ensure the most advanced projects can be recognized.”

Uptime Institute’s GEIT Awards, now in their fifth year, are judged by a committee of independent experts. The 2012 application has simplified data requirements to streamline the application process, and both the 2012 application forms and categories reflect an increased emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration and improved resource efficiency in energy, water, and carbon use.

This year’s GEIT Award categories are:

• Facility Design - Innovation - Cutting-edge data center designs that focus on energy and resource efficiency.

• Facility Design - Implementation - Cutting-edge data center projects that demonstrate energy and resource efficiency in a new, operational data center.

• Facility Retrofit - Data center facility retrofit projects that significantly improved energy and/or resource efficiency in an existing data center.

• IT Retrofit - Projects in which IT operations staff significantly improved energy and/or resource efficiency while improving IT effectiveness.

• Facility Product Deployment - Facility infrastructure products that significantly improve data center energy and/or resource efficiency, as demonstrated in a user deployment.

• IT Product Deployment - IT products that significantly improve energy and/or resource efficiency, as demonstrated in a user deployment.

• Modular Data Center Product Deployment - Resource- and energy-efficient modular data center products, as demonstrated in a user deployment in a new or existing data center.

• Audacious Idea - New, unprecedented ideas for realizing energy and resource efficiency that are not commercially available in the IT and data center industries.

Organizations from 19 countries participated in last year’s awards program, and six countries were represented among the honorees. Past winners of GEIT Awards include AOL, Capgemini, CEMEX, Hewlett-Packard, Helsingin Energia, Itaú, Kaiser Permanente, Savvis, Schneider Electric, Tieto, the University of Hertfordshire, the U.S .House of Representatives, and Verizon Wireless.

 Completed applications must be submitted by midnight PST, February 3, 2012.