ZDNET has a post summarizing the three data center rating systems out there - Uptime, LEED, and CEEDA. The author summarizes the current rating system hype.

How does your datacenter rate?

By David Chernicoff | January 20, 2011, 11:39am PST

Many businesses looking at building new datacenters announce that they are planning on achieving certification for their new datacenter by an external authority that will evaluate their datacenter and grant a specific status or award to the facility. When the new datacenter gets such a status or award, the company will send out press releases, tell stockholders, and use it in their promotional material, if applicable. But the standard for the current crop of rating entities are consistent only across their own ratings, and there are more groups doing this than you might realize. Here’s the current crop of high-end standards and awards applied to datacenters.

One of the most popular out in the public is LEED, and the author pops that illusion .

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)

This standard, run by the US Green Building Council, you might be surprised to learn, is not a datacenter standard per se, despite all the press over the last year on datacenters achieving high LEED awards. The USGBC defines the standard as “a nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high-performance green buildings.” And while a datacenter needs to work hard to achieve LEED awards, the basic metric is not designed to rate a fully optimized datacenter.

Does your marketing group tell you to get a LEED rating?