The Wipro data center in Kings Mountain, North Carolina has attained LEED Gold certification (Photo: Wipro).
Wipro Technologies, the global IT consulting and outsourcing business of Wipro Limited, has achieved LEED Gold certification for its flagship data center at Kings Mountain. LEED is becoming fairly standard, but Gold certification is a nice achievement, and it gives us an opportunity to take a deeper look at the facility.
More on achieving LEED Gold
Wipro’s King Mountain data center achieved LEED Gold certification for the energy, lighting, water, and materials used during construction, as well as the sustainable savings to be realized during the ongoing operation of the data center:
- More than 98 percent of construction waste was diverted from landfills and recycled.
- Over 40% of building materials were sourced regionally, reducing the overall carbon emissions required to deliver to the project site.
- New building materials feature 40% recycled content.
- It has a new roofing system that reflects light and does not soak in heat, resulting in reduced energy required for climate control.
- A 40% reduction in water usage over conventional business by using rainwater collection tanks to supply all non-potable water needs. 70% reduction in irrigation needs by utilizing efficient landscaping and stored rainwater.
- 40% reduction in total water usage.
- 17% reduction in total energy usage.
“From conceptual design to construction, our team has learned much about cutting-edge green building technology and takes a tremendous amount of pride in building our eco-friendly facility," said Pinaki Kar, CEO, Wipro Data Center Services. "There are less than 50 data centers in the world today which are LEED Gold certified, and we are thrilled to be a part of this exclusive group.”
“Wipro’s LEED certification demonstrates tremendous green building leadership,” said Rick Fedrizzi, President, CEO & Founding Chair of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which created and manages the LEED program.
As a tenant of this new facility, its customers can also use this certification as part of their own Green Initiatives. The data center supports all major platforms including mainframe, Windows, UNIX, Linux and iSeries, and houses the company’s cloud computing services (IaaS/iStructure).
About the King's Mountain facility
The King’s Mountain facility is a tier III designed, 215,000 square foot building that will have approximately 80,000 square feet of raised floor when completed. It has 20,000 initial square feet, and it is both pod and container capable.
It houses both chilled water and compressed air handlers for temperature control requirements, with air handler units supplied by either redundant glycol filled fluid chillers, or by redundant chilled water loops connected to three 150-ton chiller units. The cooling tower is supplied by city water sources and a private well backup.
UPS systems consist of racks of batteries allowing approximately 15 minutes on full load in the event of commercial power failure, maintaining uninterrupted power until the generators kick in, if need be. The generators automatically start after 15 seconds, supplying power to maintain the facility after 30 seconds. There’s a five-day supply of fuel stored on-site, with a two hour response time to fill the tanks again.
The facility also has extensive security including multi-level card-key access system, biometric readers at key locations, CCTV both on the interior and exterior, and security officers on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There’s facility grounding and lightning protection, including a state-of-the-art electrical ground ring system encircles the entire facility, with deep-driven stainless steel rods at each of its four corners.
In terms of facility grounding and lightning protection, a state of the art electrical ground ring system encircles the entire facility, with deep-driven stainless steel rods at each of its four corners.
It has several direct carriers coming into the building, and it deployed a Core POP (Point of Presence) strategy in the Kings Mountain data center where it interconnects with telecom providers in its Core POPs, which are located in carrier hotels in Charlotte and Atlanta. The Charlotte Core POP is located in the Windstream Hosted Solutions facility and the Atlanta Core POP is located in the TelX facility.
