Mark Wood

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  www.fortworthjobs.com/Articles/i/ad3912/blogs/text/java - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 9/29/2008    Last Visited: 10/2/2008  

  "Server guys would just hang on to dead servers just in case," says Mark Wood, Highmark's director of data center infrastructure.

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  www.datacenterworld.com/conference-details/sessions/bes - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 5/3/2007    Last Visited: 5/3/2007  

  Mark Wood, Director, Enterprise Infrastructure, Highmark, Inc.

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  www.insurancetech.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=20820 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 5/23/2008    Last Visited: 6/27/2008  

  Up to three years ago, we never really worried about power," says Mark Wood, director of infrastructure for Pittsburgh-based Highmark.

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  www.accelerateresults.com/category/2/article/174-set-go - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 4/11/2008    Last Visited: 6/20/2008  

  "Inventory what you have, and take the low-hanging fruit to get it out of the way," says Mark Wood, director of data center infrastructure at Highmark Insurance in Pittsburgh, Pa. For example, easily installed software will automatically turn PCs off at night and on in the morning.
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  Wood, for example, wants to decrease his 329 servers by 30 percent, which should help him reduce power consumption by 10 percent this year.

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  www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/Apr/09/data_c - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 10/13/2008    Last Visited: 12/10/2007  

  Health insurance provider Highmark's data center in eastern Pennsylvania is one of the only stand-alone data centers in the country that has LEED silver status and also has been certified as a Tier III facility by the Uptime Institute, according to Mark Wood, the director of infrastructure management at Highmark.
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  "LEED is written around office space and not data centers," said Wood."It would have been much more difficult (without the office component).With energy the way it is, it can save you some money over the long run.But it does cost more to do a LEED building.It increased the cost of this project by 3 to 4 percent."
  
  Highmark hired Holder Construction, CS Technology and Baltimore architects RTKL for the project, which cost approximately $40 million.Any company interested in a LEED certification must commit early in the process, according to Wood."If you going to do it, do it from the beginning," he said."You need to build a library of documentation to submit for LEED certification.We were always measuring to the Leeds points in dollars.We were balancing budget and points the whole time."
  
  The LEED program awards points for environmental design in five areas: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality.Wood said some of the additional expense for a LEED certification is in "soft costs," including increased in fees from contractors.But the need to use additional recycled materials added to the project cost."The key here was to try and buy the materials as close as possible to the project to reduce travel costs," said Wood.
  
  The LEED process also governed decisions regarding fire protection."We don't use any CFCs in our HVAC or cooling systems," Wood said, which rules out FM-200 and a number of other suppression agents.
  
  Wood said that Highmark's green data center not only makes an environmental statement but is a marketing tool for the company.The facility has a tour aisle, so visitors can get a complete view of the innovations to meet the LEED standard.
  
  Becoming LEED-compliant wasn't easy, but Wood believes it was worth it."If your window is very short, it may be hard to participate in this program," he said.

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  www.istonish.com/ServicesAndSolutions/GreenIT/GreenITUs - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 10/13/2008    Last Visited: 8/17/2008  

  Currently, the company's main data center in Harrisburg uses about 700 kilowatts of electricity per month â€" enough to power 175 homes, says Mark Wood, director of data center infrastructure.
  
  Highmark will pay 6.5 cents per kilowatt until 2010, when rate caps come off.But after that, "we're expecting a 20% to 30% increase in energy costs," says Wood."Anything we can do now to reduce consumption will lower that." Highmark began virtualizing servers last year, replacing about 100 of them with virtualized machines.IT also has migrated its Lotus Notes mail system from servers to an existing mainframe, using previously unused mainframe capacity to support e-mail at the 12,000-person company.IT will keep working on server virtualization this year, Wood says, but that's only a start."Now we need to look at disk virtualization, and we need to go to de-duplication of data to save [disk storage] space," he adds.
  
  Highmark has taken a unique approach to the challenge of cooling equipment in the data center, where it recirculates the air to keep temperatures down."The air handlers on the floor push cold air under the raised floor.We then pull that air through the front door of our 19-inch [server] racks as part of our cooling system," Wood says.

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  Green Ideas™ - News - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 4/22/2007    Last Visited: 11/23/2007  

  Mark Wood, director of data center infrastructure for Highmark, said up-front investment in gaining LEED certification for its data center added about 3% to the development cost, but operational efficiencies will offset the investment.
  
  "Everyone knows that data centers are power hogs and one of our corporate strategies is to reduce energy use," Wood said.

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  King of the Hill - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 4/1/2005    Last Visited: 5/18/2005  

  In fact, according to Highmark's data center director, Mark Wood, the insurer uses a sophisticated B-to-B electronic network that connects more than 100 hospitals and 15,000 health-care practitioners, processes 500,000 claims a day and responds to 33,000 customer inquiries per day.

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  McNees Wallace & Nurick LLC - Newsroom - Electric Rate... - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 7/13/2008    Last Visited: 7/31/2008  

  Then joining host Terry Madonna for a discussion of the green initiatives undertaken by Highmark and other companies are Phyllis Barber, Sustainability Coordinator for Highmark, Mark Wood, Director of Data Center Infrastructure for Highmark, and Kelly Lewis, President of the Technology Council of Central Pennsylvania.

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  RealEstateJournal | New Magazine Will Focus On Golf... - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 11/10/2005    Last Visited: 11/14/2005  

  "We have a lot of audits that come through," says Mark Wood, data-center director at Highmark.

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