Datacentre Leaders' Awards 2008

The best companies in datacentre design, operation and management were recognised at the prestigious Datacentre Leaders' Awards 2008 ceremony held in London recently.

The Future Thinking and Design Concept Award went to BNB Developments and 5Nines Datacentres for the UK's 'most energy efficient datacentre' at the Elean data campus near Cambridge. The datacentre uses waste heat from a nearby bio-mass power station.

Fujitsu won the Innovation in the Mega Datacentre Award for its London North Datacentre. The 1,600 rack datacentre is Europe's first to be given confirmed, official Tier III certification by the Uptime Institute for a design which delivers CO2 emission savings of 11,788 tonnes per year - equivalent to 7,000 UK homes.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office scooped two awards, one for Innovation in the Medium Datacentre and another for Leadership in the Public Sector for the development at its Hanslope Park Facility in partnership with Hoare Lea Consulting Engineers. London City Airport's Modular Datacentre in partnership with Red Vista won in the Innovation in the Micro Data Center category.

The Green Datacentre Award went to EDS in partnership with Norman Disney &Young and Houseman Henderson Architects for the SMC4 Datacentre near Sunderland. Recognising that cooling was the most significant opportunity for energy saving and that the mean ambient temperature in the North East of England was low, the team decided to use the cool northern air to directly cool the IT equipment and plantrooms. This approach is expected to provide an annual energy saving of about 40% compared to a typical datacentre design.

Digital Realty Trust's IBM project Paris collected the award for Innovation in an Outsourced Environment. Operational Team of the Year went to Morgan Stanley Enterprise Data Centres Group in partnership with Norland Managed Services and Redstone Converged Solutions. Greg Metcalf of ARUP was named Young Mission Critical Engineer of the Year.

This year's Datacentre Leaders' Awards attracted unprecedented interest and a record number of entries and over six hundred data center professionals attended the ceremony at London's Royal Lancaster Hotel.

Zahl Limbuwala, Chairman, Data Centre Specialist Group at the British Computer Society (BCS) oversaw the judging process. He said: "The judging panel of industry experts were rigorous in their approach and all of the awards were hotly contested. Congratulations to the deserving winners."