Facebook Leads the Charge for its Prineville Data Center

 

Winners of the inaugural DatacenterDynamics Awards for North America – the first in the region – were announced at the gala ceremony at the Julia Morgan Ballroom, in the Merchants Exchange Building, San Francisco, last week. Facebook took home two awards on the evening for its Prineville Data center, with other notable winners including Fidelity, Datapipe, the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputer, Digital Reality and Citi.

 

Dr Ian Bitterlin, who referred to the Awards as the “Oscar’s of our industry”, said he felt the standard of entries was higher than any he had seen in his previous six years as a judge for the European Awards program.

 

The expert judging panel, which includes some of the most recognized experts in the industry, scored more 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, said: “We are excited to be part of an awards program that highlights the many great projects our industry successfully delivers.”

 

The winners for the first DatacenterDynamics North American Awards are:

Future Thinking & Design Concepts – Facebook for its Prineville data center
Sponsored by Schneider Electric this award celebrates the innovation and thinking that is shaping the next generation of cutting-edge data center solutions.

 

Innovation in the Medium Data Center – 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

 

Innovation in the Mega-Data Center – 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.

 

Innovation in the Outsourced Environment –  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.

 

‘Green’ Data Center of the Year – 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.

 

Improved Data Center Efficiency – 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.

 

Data Center Special Assignment Team of The Year – Citi’s Data Center Migration team
Sponsored by DCProfessional Development, this award was a hotly contested with finalists including eBay, Sabey and Compass.

 

Outstanding Contribution to the Industry – Christian Belady, general manager for Data Center Research in Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services
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.

 

About the DatacenterDynamics Awards
The DatacenterDynamics Awards are the leading awards for the data center industry recognizing innovation, leadership and ‘out of the box’ thinking. With 15 established award categories and active award programs in Europe, Greater China, Japan, Spanish speaking Latin America and Brasil, the awards celebrate successful data center projects of all sizes, across all sectors with many hundreds of worthy entries.