Special Focus: Thursday, May 12

The Disrupted Enterprise:
Efficiency, Energy and Carbon

• Energy-aware capacity planning and site selection. How can virtualization, consolidation, and efficient equipment relieve capacity constraints in existing data centers? When building, what factors are important to site selection? (Hint: energy prices, regulations, carbon)


• Cost savings, through energy savings. How can cutting energy use save on the OpEx budget, and hedge against rising electricity (and carbon) prices?


• Regulations, compliance, and risk management. What will it take to comply with new rules such as the US EPA's Mandatory Reporting rule, the UK CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, new ASHRAE efficiency standards, and others? What other regulations are in the pipe?


• New business opportunities. What new business opportunities are there in selling new technologies (e.g., smart grid) or adding new features to existing products (e.g., efficient servers)?


• Utility incentives and voluntary standards. What financial incentives are local utilities offering? How can a company differentiate its brand or fulfill "green" mandates from key customers, by pursuing voluntary programs (LEED for data centers, ENERGY STAR, etc.)


• Technology. How can organizations best evaluate their technology options? These include modular data centers, "green" cloud computing, IT power management (from data center to desktop), smart grid, new power/cooling technologies, facility energy management, dynamic cooling optimization, carbon/sustainability tracking, virtualization, IT asset management, and others.
  
  
• Sustainability and carbon management. How do organizations use IT to measure their resource use, their emissions, and to optimize for resource efficiency? Which sustainability metrics should be used, and how should they be measured and tracked?

• And more. Best practices for efficiency, corporate sustainability management, IT's role in "greening" the rest of the economy, outside air cooling, application-level vs equipment-level redundancy, and more.