List of LEED Data Centers (Updated)

There have been some headlines this week about Advanced Data Centers receiving a Platinum LEED rating for its new facility in Sacramento. If you’re interested in learning more about this project, check out our June 5 story about ADC’s Platinum LEED certification back in June. Here’s our updated list of LEED facilities, reflecting the ADC certification:

LEED Certified Data Centers: The following data center facilities have been certified under the LEED standard:

• Fannie Mae Urbana Technology Center: In 2005 this 247,000 square foot facility became the first data center to earn LEED certification. The FNMA Technology Center, located in Urbana, Md., is a mixed-use facility with both office and data center components, a trend seen in a number of LEED-certified data centers, as the office component makes it somewhat easier to meet the standards.
• Highmark Data Center (Silver): This 87,000 square foot facility includes office space and 28,000 square feet of raised-floor technical space. The data center in West Hanover, Pa., which opened in November 2005, processes 500,000 claims per day. It was the second LEED data center, and the first to earn a LEED Silver certification.
• The U.S. EPA National Computer Center (Silver): This facility in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park provides large-scale computing services for the EPA nationwide. NCC also supports regulatory program offices and administrative activities, as well as advanced supercomputing for scientific research in air quality protection and other environmental studies. A 2007 upgrade added solar panels on the roof.
• Digital Realty Trust Chicago Project (Gold): This 20,000 square foot build-to-suit facility within Digital Realty’s 350 East Cermak Road carrier hotel became the first data center to be certified for LEED Gold status.
• Monsanto Headquarters Data Center: The company spent $21 million building a green data center facility at its headquarters campus in Creve Coeur, Mo. You can check out a time lapse video of the data center construction.
• Advanced Data Centers is building a 237,000 square foot data center at McClellan Park on McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, California. The USGBC has pre-certified the ADC facility for a LEED score of 50 points, above the 45 points required for LEED Platinum, the highest certification tier.
• 60 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Mass. is a 9,000 square foot data center on the campus of Harvard University that is LEED-certified and houses the university’s Network Operations Center and the Server Operations Center.
• Citigroup Data Center in Georgetown, Texas (Austin market). This $450 million facility has received LEED Gogld certification, and is one of several new Citigroup facilities designed to achieve LEED status.  

Was the SVLG Summit A Breakthrough?

The Data Center Energy Summit organized by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group featured some interesting case studies and reports (including both the Data Center Chill-Off and Accenture Update on the EPA energy study). Many participants expressed optimism that the information sharing and brainstorming at the event were a sign that the major data center players are making progress in working together to address the industry’s energy efficiency challenges. Some of those viewpoints are captured in this video from the event, which features introductory comments from Deborah Grove of the Green IT blog.

For more news on energy efficiency, visit our Green Data Centers channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Microsoft Shares Insights on Efficiency, PUE

Microsoft has published a series of articles on how it uses Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to track and manage the energy efficiency of its huge data centers. The series was put together by Mike Manos (GM of Data Center Services) and Christian Belady (Principal Power and Cooling Architect), and is in three parts:

• An overview of the PUE metric
• Why energy efficiency is a critical cost issue, and why companies are slow to adopt PUE
• A look at the three stages of implementing a good PUE strategy

The series closes with a call to action, and some tips from Mike and Christian on creating incentives to gain buy-in across the organization. Efficiency is a key evaluation criteria for Microsoft’s data center managers, a strategy that is part of the company’s focus on energy-efficient data centers. The articles are featured on The Power of Software, a new blog from Microsoft to educate software developers and architects about Green IT principles. Links via the Green Data Center blog.

Are Customers Balking at Green Premium?

Are businesses less willing to pay more for “green” solutions than they were a year ago? Or are managed hosting customers less motivated to save energy than colocation customers?

Those are among the questions raised by new customer research released yesterday by Rackspace. The survey showed strong interest in operating in a more eco-friendly manner, but also found that just 41 percent of respondents are willing to pay more for green products and services, down significantly from 52 percent in 2007. The Rackspace survey (available online as a PDF) also found that just 28 percent of customers are willing to trade a 5 to 10 percent decrease in server performance for lower carbon emissions, which was down from 51 percent in 2007.

“It’s interesting to see that customers still think green is very important, but today they may be less willing to pay more or trade performance for lower carbon emissions,” said John Engates, CTO, Rackspace Hosting. “Rackspace understands these concerns, and the economic pressure points, and is working diligently to leverage the available technology in ways that don’t impose additional costs on the customer.”

Cassatt: Power Down for Energy Savings

Sometimes the path to a greener data center happens in small steps that appear obvious but often are left undone. “It’s your mother’s old advice: ‘Turn off the lights when you leave the room,’” said Bill Coleman, CEO of Cassatt and keynote speaker at the O’Reilly Velocity conference in Burlingame, Calif.

Except in this case, the room in question is a data center with hundreds or thousands of servers with blinking lights. Many of those lights represent mission-critical services, so just flipping a switch doesn’t quite cut it. “There’s this myth that you can’t turn off servers,” said Coleman. “This is easy, cheap and fast. The problem is figuring out which servers to turn off.”

That’s where Cassatt comes in. The company makes software to provide “active power management” for data center operators, allowing them to identify those idle servers. “At Cassatt we believe data center efficiency starts with a simple, intelligent approach to operating your servers

RackForce, IBM Team on GigaCenters

IBM today confirmed that it will work with Rackforce Corp. to develop a large new high-density data center in British Columbia. A newly-launched Rackforce company, GigaCenters, will be building a 150,000 square foot green data center with expertise from IBM. The new facility will be the largest data center in Canada and among the most efficient large-scale data centers in the world.

While today’s announcement didn’t cite specific density goals, previous reports about the project suggest the facility will be able to accommodate power loads of up to 700 watts per square foot.

“Our intention is to build a data center in a safe and secure location to respond to a growing concern around disaster recovery requirements caused by natural events such as earthquakes and floods,” said Tim Dufour, president of RackForce. “We knew there was an opportunity to provide North American companies with a data center that could do all of this. Working with IBM as part of a comprehensive Green Data Center approach, we were able to design the facility to optimize power usage.”

EPA Extends Energy Star, DOE Releases DC Pro

This week there are several news items from the federal government agencies working with the data center sector on energy efficiency initiatives:

The Environmental Protection Agency has delayed the start of its National Data Center Energy Efficiency Program, an information-sharing initiative to develop an Energy Star certification for data center facilities. The one-year program had been scheduled to commence June 1, but the state has been pushed back to July 1 to allow additional participants to sign up. The EPA had hoped to have at least 100 data centers agree to share information on their energy usage, but as of late May just 54 data centers had signed up. Participants must collect 12 consecutive months of IT and building (whole building if stand-alone or data center portion only if within a larger building) energy use data, and submit the data by June 1, 2009. Additional details and instructions on how to participate are available at the Energy Star web site (PDF).

The Department of Energy has released the beta version of The Data Center Energy Profiler. The online tool, better known as DC Pro, allows users to complete a data center profile that can help identify potential energy savings. The survey takes about an hour to complete, and provides a customized, printable report that shows the details of energy purchases for your data center, how energy is consumed by your data center, potential cost and energy savings, comparison of your data center energy utilization versus other data centers, and a list of next steps. DC Pro was released June 2.

LEED Platinum Rating for Advanced Data Centers

A new facility under construction in Sacramento, California will become the first data center to gain Platinum certification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard from the U.S. Green Buildings Council, the national benchmark for the design and construction of high performance green buildings.

Advanced Data Centers (ADC) is building a 237,000 square foot data center at McClellan Park on McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, California. The USGBC has pre-certified the ADC facility for a LEED score of 50 points, above the 45 points required for LEED Platinum, the highest certification tier.

“To our knowledge, this is the first purpose-built data center to achieve LEED Platinum,” said Michael Cohen, the President of Advanced Data Centers, which is redeveloping a building once used by the U.S. Air Force for IT operations.

Roundup: The Uptime Institute Symposium

This week’s Uptime Institute Symposium on Green Enterprise Computing has wrapped up, and several attendees have posted summaries of the key presentations:

• Ken Oestreich from Cassatt has recaps of each of the conference’s three days, including a review of Wednesday’s presentations from the EPA on Energy Star initiatives for the data center, as well as the DOE’s DC-Pro tool. Ken also has summaries of Day One and Day Two of the event.
• Deborah Grove also writes about the EPA programs, including its initiative to gather energy efficiency information from data center operators. Deborah also blogs about a breakfast for women participating in the symposium on day two, and Ken Brill’s keynote.

Uptime Honors HP, Sun, UPS, AOL, NetApp

The Uptime Institute today announced winners of its Green Enterprise IT Awards, which honor organizations “pioneering energy-efficiency improvements in their data center operations.” The awards were presented in Orlando at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2008: Green Enterprise Computing, and were co-sponsored by Deloitte Consulting. Here’s a list of the winners:

• Sun Microsystems (JAVA): Energy Efficient IT Hardware Deployment
• UPS (UPS): Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (power and cooling) Overhead
• AOL LLC (TWX): Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (power and cooling) Overhead
• NetApp (NTAP): IT Hardware Asset Utilization
• Bank of Montreal (BMO): IT Hardware Asset Utilization
• Nationwide Mutual Insurance: IT Strategy
• Hewlett Packard (HPQ): IT Strategy
• Hewlett Packard: Green IT Beyond the Data Center

“Realizing that neither business nor the environment can sustain the costs of the increasing energy demands in data centers, the award-winning companies have displayed leadership and innovation in their data center energy efficiency efforts,” said Kenneth G. Brill, Institute founder and executive director. “It is our hope that they will serve as a clear example to the world’s largest operators of critical computing facilities of the realistic impact and feasibility of these types of initiatives.”