It could be the fact that the economic downturn is forcing financial firms to slash costs anywhere possible or that "Green IT" essentially equals "more green in your pocket," but datacenters seem to be getting quite a lot of focus lately.

As I wrote in a post earlier this year, datacenters are becoming the new differentiator for those firms that have them. Capital markets firms and facility vendors are touting their "crown jewels" and reaping all kinds of savings and rewards from their infrastructure investments.

What’s left to do but to organize? The Data Center Pulse (DCP), which was formed late last year, has just clocked its 1,000th member. The DCP community now reaches into 45 countries and more than 600 companies. The organization’s goal is to create a place where “datacenter industry operators could gather to share ideas on best practices and ultimately influence the industry.” It sounds like a good place for the smaller firms to come and learn what they can do to even the playing field with some of the larger broker-dealers and datacenter providers.

Not to be left out in the cold, the government has just set up its own Save Energy Now program geared at “developing training certificate programs for datacenter end-users that will focus on datacenter energy efficiency.” Set up by the U.S. Department of Energy, the program aims to reduce energy use in the U.S. facilities by 10 percent by 2011. Sounds like a hefty target for some, but for the capital markets firms that are looking to save on power and cooling costs, this might seem like a small goal.
--Oksana Poltavets, US Reporter, Delaing with Technology