More than 400 senior IT and data center executives from among the world’s largest operators of critical computing facilities will convene in Orlando, Fla., April 27-30, for the Uptime Institute Symposium 2008: Green Enterprise Computing. The Symposium will aim to tackle strategic and operational hurdles and develop industry benchmarks for improving energy efficiency in data centers.

Keynotes will include Microsoft’s chief of data centers, Michael Manos; Dell’s vice president of data center infrastructure, Dr. Albert Esser; and Yahoo’s director of climate and energy strategy, Christina Page, as well as top computing executives from IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, VMWare and APC.

The Uptime Institute, based in Santa Fe, is a leading think-tank and corporate advisory on the business and technology issues related to critical computing environment reliability and energy efficiency.

At the April Symposium, the Institute will reveal key findings from a recent study of its largest data center members, who have gone from an annual energy consumption rate of 6 percent for the years 1999 to 2005, to 20 to 30 percent in each of the years 2006 and 2007.

“These results are staggering, far exceeding EPA forecasts of 9 percent energy consumption growth between 2006 and 2010,” said Kenneth G. Brill, Institute founder and executive director. “Besides the great financial strain from rapidly increasing and highly inefficient energy consumption in data centers, the environmental strain is tremendous. Just in the United States, we would need to build 30 power plants in the next decade just to support our increased IT energy consumption.”

In parallel, in a recent Uptime Institute survey of more than 25,000 IT and enterprise data center professionals, 42 percent of respondents said that their data centers would run out of electric power capacity in the next 12 to 24 months; 67 percent said their organization has no formal sustainability or energy efficiency policy or mandate.

Symposium 2008 will engage C-level executives in keynote interviews, roundtables, and working groups to explore their approaches to energy efficiency; to address IT policy, governance, economic and regulatory issues of greatest concern to these executives; and to encourage their commitment to significant IT energy reduction.

Corporate symposium participants include AOL, Google, Boeing, Citigroup, Northwest Airlines, Chevron, Duke Energy Corporation and JPMorgan Chase & Co., among many others.

A key feature of this year’s Symposium is Executive Summit Wednesday, a one-day event on April 30 that will mark the release of a joint report by McKinsey & Company and Uptime Institute. McKinsey Associate Principal for IT William Forrest and the Institute’s Brill will present the report, “Revolutionizing Data Center Energy Efficiency—Key Analyses,” which outlines areas of greatest inefficiencies in data center management and makes six major corporate IT structural and governance recommendations.

The Executive Summit will also feature a CIO/CTO-level roundtable of Fortune 50-size corporations. Members of the roundtable will discuss the McKinsey/Uptime Institute findings in light of their current internal policies and initiatives. All other attending senior executives will participate in an open discussion and work toward an enterprise IT and data center energy policy leadership consensus to be made public at the close of the Symposium.

Briefings from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star computing efficiency programs and the U.S. Department of Energy’s consumption measurement and benchmarking efforts will round out the Executive Summit.

During this year’s Symposium, Uptime Institute will recognize high-level recipients of the new Green Enterprise IT Awards, which honor organizations that are actively and profitably pioneering energy efficiency improvements in their data centers.

For more information on the Symposium, click here: http://uptimeinstitute.org/content/view/99/111/

To view a list of currently registered delegate participants, click here: http://uptimeinstitute.org/content/view/100/67/