Uptime Institute Plans Design Charrette

The Uptime Institute has announced its Design Charrette 2007 to be held Oct. 28-30 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The event, titled "Engineering & Managing Site Infrastructure of the Future," will be a two-day discussion that brings together major data center stakeholders to "create an industry roadmap of best practice data centers that are energy efficient, reliable, concurrently maintainable, and fault-tolerant." A charrette is a collaborative session in which a group of designers drafts a solution to a design problem.

"I hope that, at the Charrette, some consensus will begin to emerge about data center metrics among key industry participants," said Jonathan Koomey, co-moderator fo the charrette and project scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "I believe that participants will develop new opportunities for improving the efficiency of both IT and site infrastructure equipment, leading to additional technological innovation and business opportunities."

Koomey expects that these best practice data centers will be supported by a wholly reorganized management team, saying "the single most important area for innovation is not technological but organizational in nature, that of reorienting incentives to encourage businesses to minimize the total cost of ownership. The industry is rife with perverse incentives (like charging per square foot when 90% of the infrastructure costs are per kW) and organizational changes are sorely needed to fix these problems." An interview with Koomey has been posted as a podcast on the Uptime Institute web site.