RED wins 2011 Green Enterprise Award from Uptime Institute

Red Engineering Design has been selected with Capgemini as joint winners of a prestigious 2011 Green Enterprise IT (GEIT) Award presented by Uptime Institute. The GEIT Awards showcase organisations that are pioneering energy efficiency improvements in their IT and data centre operations. The award was presented at the sixth annual Uptime Institute Symposium which took place in Santa Clara, CA on 11th May 2011. As part of the awards scheme’s knowledge-sharing mandate, Nick Vaney of Red Engineering Design presented a case study of the award-winning data centre to the Symposium, which comprises probably the most influential all-stakeholder thought-leadership audience in the global data centre sector.

RED’s design for the Tier III Capgemini Merlin data centre in Swindon, UK, won the Data Centre Design category. All the entries were submitted anonymously and went through a rigorous double-blind judging process - ie judges do not know whose applications they review, and applicants do not know which judges reviewed their application - by a committee of independent judges. Entries were judged on five key criteria: new knowledge, knowledge transferability, impact, measurability, and audaciousness of goal.

Pitt Turner, Executive Director of Uptime Institute, said, “A principal objective of the GEIT Awards is to share effective ways to reduce energy consumption by highlighting innovation and best practice. This accolade is a significant accomplishment, and confirms Red Engineering Design as innovative leaders in the sector, having completed an exceptional major data centre construction project that really pushes the envelope on energy productivity.”

RED director Nick Vaney, who with fellow director Ian Whitfield, was one of the UK’s first two Uptime Institute Accredited Tier Designers, said, “Capgemini was, and is, strategically committed to achieving step-change improvements in sustainability, and their brief was challenging, starting with a target of 40% improvement in energy efficiency. Most data centres feature extensive power and cooling infrastructure systems and it had been thought that there is an inevitable trade-off between power efficiency (PUE) and resilience. Merlin shows this need not be so. The solution was necessarily radical, involving a high degree of genuine innovation and a great deal of courage to ‘run with’. The result is probably the most energy efficient and flexible enterprise data centre in the world, with an annual PUE of 1.11. By offering huge energy savings with Tier III performance, Merlin makes environmental responsibility’s economic argument compelling, and green technology’s promise deliverable.”