SVLG's Data Center Energy Summit 2008

Yesterday's event at the Sun Microsystems Santa Clara campus brought together participants and interested data center operators to hear the results of the pilots conducted throughout the last 12 months. You can read more from James Niccolai's posts to several IDG websites, for example, here or here.  At the reception following, there was conversation afterwards on whether the conclusions reached by the interim analysis presented by Accenture can be extrapolated for widespread use, or whether the small sample size means that findings are an indication more than a validation of any predictions by the EPA.   You can download reports here and make your own decisions.

Meanwhile, it was a stellar event for several reasons:
    because the content was so dense that everyone in the audience felt it was a worthwhile learning experience
    the informal data collection over the last 15 months has yielded a baseline of data center energy efficiency numbers
    the mood was very much one of "lets continue this series of experiments and tackle additional technologies next year.

What can we expect next year?  Since Ray Pfeifer has joined SynapSense and is  "one of the vendor community", he has handed over most of the responsibility to KC Mares, who announced that he wants to continue the collaborative and lowkey style Ray put in motion last year.  Ray confided that there were many "nibblers" this year, those company managers who attended meetings and were indecisive about whether to commit to pilots, who have recently expressed interest in joining the next wave of pilots.  Have a green day!