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Server Roundup Winners

Uptime Institute is pleased to announce Visa and AOL as the winners of the 2015 Server Roundup competition. According to Uptime Institute estimates, up to 30% of servers in IT departments are "comatose" – abandoned but still racked and running, wasting energy and placing ongoing demands on data center facility power and capacity. For the past four years, Server Roundup has recognized the hard work of the participating organizations and demonstrated how IT teams can drive out unnecessary costs by taking immediate action on this problem. 

server-roundup-logoIdentifying and decommissioning unused equipment requires some effort and organizational commitment, but the rewards are great: millions of dollars saved, thousands of kW hours in reduced energy consumption, lower software licensing and maintenance fees, and a smaller carbon footprint. 

This year's winners -- global finacial giant Visa, and AOL, an organization that has participated in the Uptime Institute Server Roundup since its inception in 2011 -- saved over $10 million in data center costs with their efforts.

Visa decommissioned 9,094 devices in 2014, reduced power consumption by 557 kW and reclaimed 3,000 square feet of data center space. The company expects to save over $US 3.2 million annually.

“We continue to focus on driving efficiency in our data centers. Continuous technology refresh and having an equally aggressive focus on decommission is key for our vision of efficient data centers,” said Swamy Kocherlakota, Visa's Head of Global Infrastructure.

AOL has continued to reduce its under-utilized server footprint for the fourth year running. With a base of 33,103 servers in production as of January 1, 2014, AOL decommissioned and physically removed 14,805 servers over the course of the year. The decommissioning of the servers in three data centers resulted in a reduction of 36,737 metric tons of carbon emissions and a total cost savings of just over $4.3 million. AOL disposes assets through a variety of third-party vendors who refurbish them for resale, donate them if appropriate, or recycle via scrap metal brokers after data sanitization. The disposal of old servers during 2014 resulted in a profit of $6 million.

"AOL's mission is to unleash the world's best builders of culture and code, and to do so we need to be the most agile, efficient and forward-looking company in the media technology industry," said William Pence, AOL Global CTO. "I am proud of the work we have done in decommissioning legacy infrastructure, implementing a colocation strategy and doubling down in cloud technology, which has allowed us to bring mobile-first, video-led consumer products and groundbreaking advertising solutions to market."

“The Server Roundup honorees are leading their peers in the industry on the issue of reducing data center resource consumption, and their lessons learned are highly transferable to the industry at large,” said Matt Stansberry, Director of Content and Publications at Uptime Institute.

The winners will be honored at the 2015 Uptime Institute Symposium, which takes place May 19-21 in Santa Clara, California. 

Winners: Brill Awards entrants are judged by region (North America, Latin America, EMEA & Russia, and Asia Pacific) and entrants may submit in the in as many as five categories: Data center Design, Operational Data Center Upgrade, Data Center Facilities Management, IT Efficiency and Product Solutions.

The winners are:

  • AIG, American International Group, Inc. (Operational Data Center Upgrade, North America)
  • Banco Bradesco S.A. (Operational Data Center Upgrade, LATAM)
  • Chesapeake Energy Corporation (Data Center Design, North America )
  • DuPont Fabros Technology (Data Center Design, North America )
  • EBRC, European Business Reliance Centre (Data Center Facilities Management, EMEA)
  • Falabella (Data Center Design, LATAM)
  • Itaú Unibanco (IT Efficiency, LATAM)
  • Morgan Stanley (Data Center Facilities Management, North America)
  • NEXTDC (Product Solutions, APAC)
  • Nomura Research Institute (Data Center Design, APAC)
  • Porto Seguro S.A. (Data Center Facilities Management, LATAM)
  • The Raytheon Company (IT Efficiency, North America)
  • Swisscom AG (Data Center Design, EMEA)

Entries for the 2015 Brill Awards exceeded our expectations, with many of the winners focusing on holistic sustainability projects that addressed both IT utilization and facilities improvements. The awards include winners from many different regions, facility types, and vertical industries, demonstrating that efficient IT projects are attainable and valuable across the entire spectrum of the industry.