About the Symposium series

The Uptime Institute Symposium is an annual spring event that brings together industry stakeholders in enterprise IT, finance, executive management, data center facilities, and corporate real estate to deal with the critical issues surrounding enterprise computing. At Symposium, the best minds in the business meet to share knowledge and discuss how the IT industry can meet its collective goals of performance, availability, energy efficiency, and profitability.

Symposium 2010 addressed the issues companies are facing today.  How can businesses

• achieve growth during times of economic turmoil?
• meet IT demands that are growing explosively, yet unpredictably?
  
• control costs, yet provision to take advantage of an upturn?
• preserve availability and improve performance, two cornerstones of enterprise IT?
• meet all these goals while being environmentally responsible and complying with current (and future) government requirements?

Insights From Previous Symposia

The Uptime Institute Symposium has a history of bringing critical industry trends to the attention of the IT and data center industry. The game-changing presentations may not always be right - they usually are --but they are consistently controversial and challenging.

Symposium 2009:  Lean, Clean & Green focused on  the business imperative for increasing enterprise computing’s and the data center’s energy efficiency. In 2009, the Institute acknowledged that the industry has begun to make progress in several key areas, but research shows that growing data center electricity use continues to threaten the economics of IT, presents challenges for energy supply security, and contributes to environmental problems. The Institute challenged organizations to make improved energy efficiency a C-level issue now.

Symposium 2008: Green Enterprise Computing explored the short-term tactics and long-term strategies for dealing with runaway data center spending and energy consumption.  In 2008, the Uptime Institute with knowledge partner McKinsey & Company released the seminal Revolutionizing Data Center Energy Efficiency report, offering three recommendations for the IT industry to arrest negative IT economic trends.

Symposium 2007: The Invisible Crisis in the Data Center examined the relationship between power and performance in high-density computing environments and the conceptual and organizational changes necessary to ensure uninterrupted availability and profitability.  At Symposium 2007, the Institute identified five strategic areas of practical, immediate improvements that yield significant energy savings without capital expenditure and offered strategies for  breaking down organizational barriers that undermine progress.

At Symposium 2006: High Density Computing, the Institute identified the causes, costs, and consequences of the economic breakdown of Moore's Law in enterprise IT and recommended areas for future research. This working group meeting established the basis for ongoing collaboration and the start of the Symposium series.