Winners of the inaugural DatacenterDynamics Awards for North America — the first one in the region — were announced at the gala ceremony at the Julia Morgan Ballroom, in the Merchants Exchange Building, San Francisco on Friday July 12th.
Facebook picked up two awards on the evening for its Prineville Data center, with other notable category winners including Fidelity Investments, Datapipe, the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputer, Digital Realty and Citigroup. Shortlisted companies for the 8 categories included eBay, HP and IBM.
Chief Judge and Chief Technology Officer of Emerson Power Systems EMEA, Professor Ian Bitterlin stated, “During my time spent judging the DatacenterDynamics awards over the past six years, they are always fair and embody the true technical rigor of the industry.” Bitterlin also commended the North American entrants who “reflect the larger and more mature industry with a real enthusiasm for winning.”
The expert judging panel, which includes some of the most recognized experts in the industry, scored more than 80 entries in a two-part judging process that included presentations from the finalists, to determine the winners of each category.
Mike O'Brien, VP of Strategic Accounts for Schneider Electric, the headline sponsor of this year’s North American awards, commented: “We wanted to bring a perspective of how far we've come as an industry over the past 20 years. From experiencing the Millennium bug scare followed by the excitement of the boom and burst of the dot com bubble, followed by the advent of the colocation business model – we are still here today because of the data center. Today, we all hold a wealth of accumulated knowledge in the palm of our hands, and the data center plays a pivotal role in this transformational technology.”
The winners for the first DatacenterDynamics North American Awards are:
Category: Future Thinking & Design Concepts
Winner: Facebook for its Prineville data center
Sponsored by Schneider Electric, this award celebrates the innovation and forward thinking that is shaping the next generation of cutting-edge data center solutions.
Category: Innovation in the Medium Data Center
Winner: Fidelity Investments for Centercore, its next-gen data center
This award recognizes excellence in the design and operation of facilities between 250kW and 2.5MW
Category: Innovation in the Mega-Data Center
Winner: Facebook’s Prineville data center
Sponsored by Cable Express, this award celebrates the larger end of the scale. Other finalists included Fortrust for their modular DC2.0 and Sabey for SDC-42.
Category: Innovation in the Outsourced Environment
Winner: Datapipe data center cloud consolidation project
Datapipe carried out this project for the audio giants D+M Group (Denon & Marantz). Finalists included Raging Wire, Sabey and Venyu.
Category: ‘Green’ Data Center of the Year
Winner: University Corporation of Atmospheric Research (UCAR) for the Wyoming Supercomputing Center
Sponsored by Sabey, this Award recognizes the reality of designing and operating data centers in the context of environmental scrutiny. Finalists included Facebook and University of Iowa.
Category: Improved Data Center Efficiency
Winner: Digital Realty’s Granular Fan Control Implementation
Sponsored globally by The Green Grid. Finalists for this category included Cisco Systems and HP, which submitted two entries.
Category: Data Center Special Assignment Team of the Year
Winner: Citigroup’s Data Center Migration team
Sponsored by DCProfessional Development, this award was a hotly contested with finalists including eBay, Sabey and Compass.
Category: Outstanding Contribution to the Industry
Winner: Christian Belady, General manager, Data center services, Microsoft
As an active member of the data center community, Christian is a founding member of ASHRAE’s TC9.9, an early architect of The Green Grid and the originator of the power usage effectiveness (PUE) metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center which is now broadly used by the industry. He joins a distinguished group of industry veterans to have won this award including Don Beaty, Peter Gross, Roger Schmidt and Ken Brill.
For more information on the DatacenterDynamics’ North American awards, visit www.datacenterdynamics.com/awards/nam. For more information on DatacenterDynamics and upcoming events, go to www.datacenterdynamics.com.
