What does the Uptime Institute do? Their About Us page puts it rather succinctly:

Institute research focuses on data center facilities, the IT and facilities interface, and how both functions affect the cost, reliability and energy consumption of computing. Institute Best Practices arise out of work with the practitioners who actually run data centers, comparative cost and uptime statistics, consulting work, surveys, and internally funded efforts. The Institute makes this detailed knowledge available to companies within the Networks, and provides high-level summaries for individual Institute members and for the broader data center industry in the form of white papers, webinars, and symposia. These publications and events are vendor-neutral.

But what does it mean for green-minded techies?

Recently, the Institute has been putting its weight behind energy efficient data center initiatives. As a member of The Green Grid, the group is helping to promote power-saving standards in data center design and facilities management. As as its name suggests, the Institute does it with reliability in mind.

Online, you can find whitepapers, podcasts, webinars and a TCO calculator if you need quidance.

They also run the Symposium trade show. For Symposium 2009, the theme is “Lean, Clean and Green.” Ending today at the NYC Hilton, it features keynotes, an expo, networking opportunities for its members and informative sessions (IT Business Edge has a good article by Carl Weinschenk on some of the topics explored).

There are also the 2009 Green Enterprise IT awards. Recipients this year include AOL’s Enterprise-Wide Data Center Optimization Project for the Data Center Energy Efficiency Improvement: IT award and APC InRow for the Energy Efficient Products: IT category, among others.

You can follow the Uptime Institute on Twitter or simply add the site to your bookmarks.