Winners of the inaugural DatacenterDynamics Awards for North America were announced at the gala ceremony at the Julia Morgan Ballroom, in the Merchants Exchange Building in San Francisco on Friday, 12 July.
 
Facebook picked up two awards on the evening for its Prineville, Oregon, data center, with other category winners including Fidelity Investments, Datapipe, the NCAR's Wyoming supercomputing data center, Digital Realty and Citigroup. Shortlisted companies for the eight categories included eBay, HP and IBM.

Here is a photo feature about the ceremony:

Peter Gross, VP of mission critical systems, Bloom Energy (left), Mukesh Khattar, energy efficiency visionary, Oracle (center), Don Beaty, founder, DLB Associates

George Slessman, CEO and product architect, IO

Ian Bitterlin, CTO, EMEA, Emerson Network Power (left), Don Beaty, founder, DLB Associates

George Rockett, co-founder, CSO, DatacenterDynamics (left), Ian Bitterlin, CTO, EMEA, Emerson Network Power

Stephen Worn, CTO, DatacenterDynamics

Facebook's data center team receiving one of their awards. The company's Prineville, Oregon, data center won in two categories: including Innovation in the Mega-Data Center, Future Thinking and Design Concepts.

Sponsored by Schneider Electric, the Future Thinking and Design Concepts award celebrates the innovation and forward thinking that is shaping the next generation of cutting-edge data center solutions.

Sponsored by Cable Express, the Innovation in the Mega-Data Center award celebrates the larger end of the data center size scale. Other finalists included Fortrust for their modular DC2.0 and Sabey for SDC-42.

Digital Realty’s Granular Fan Control Implementation project won the Improved Data Center Efficiency award, sponsored globally by The Green Grid. Finalists for this category included Cisco Systems and HP, which submitted two entries.

Fidelity Investments Centercore data center design won the Innovation in the Medium Data Center award. This award recognizes excellence in the design and operation of facilities between 250kW and 2.5MW.

Citigroup’s Data Center Migration team won the Data Center Special Assignment Team of the Year award. Sponsored by DC Professional Development, this award was hotly contested, with finalists including eBay, Sabey and Compass.

Datapipe's data center cloud consolidation project for a client won the Innovation in the Outsourced Environment award. Datapipe carried out this project for the audio giants D+M Group (Denon & Marantz). Finalists included Raging Wire, Sabey and Venyu.

‘Green’ Data Center of the Year award winner was University Corporation of Atmospheric Research (UCAR) for the Wyoming Supercomputing Center. Sponsored by Sabey, this Award recognizes the reality of designing and operating data centers in the context of environmental scrutiny. Finalists included Facebook and University of Iowa.

Christian Belady, General manager, Data center services, Microsoft won the Outstanding Contribution to the Industry award. Don Beaty accepted the award for Belady, who was absent. As an active member of the data center community, Christian is a founding member of ASHRAE’s TC9.9, an early architect of The Green Grid and the originator of the power usage effectiveness (PUE) metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center which is now broadly used by the industry. He joins a distinguished group of industry veterans to have won this award including Don Beaty, Peter Gross, Roger Schmidt and Ken Brill.

The DatacenterDynamics Awards are the leading awards for the data center industry recognizing innovation, leadership and 'out of the box' thinking. With 15 established award categories and active award programs in Europe, Greater China, Japan, Spanish speaking Latin America and Brasil, the awards celebrate successful data center projects of all sizes, across all sectors with many hundreds of worthy entries.