Читать книгу Maintaining Mission Critical Systems in a 24/7 Environment - Peter M. Curtis - Страница 53

In addition to the previously mentioned design considerations, The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification is also important to consider. LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system developed by the US Green Building Council and should not be overlooked when designing a data center. LEED Certification will look great for customers as well as the boardroom since its implementation requires energy efficiency improvements. While initial costs for LEED certification are 2‐4% higher than standard building construction, it theoretically results in an energy savings annually over the facility's lifecycle. LEED has yet to develop specific standards that apply to data centers in the accreditation process in its current version 2.2. LEED BD+C: Data Center (Building Design and Construction) has been developed and rolled out to the masses. It is aimed at remediating special data center conditions as compared to typical office building LEED requirements. In addition, LEED 2009 introduced a new method of weighting credits and systems, such as LEED Bookshelf, that will allow the creation of new credits, which is very promising for data centers’ energy challenges.

Certification involves categories such as sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy & atmosphere, materials & resources, indoor environmental quality, renewable power, innovation & design, and regional priority. A 100‐point scale with 10 bonus points is assigned to these categories, and there are four levels of certification: certified, silver, gold, and platinum. The most points can be earned in the Energy & Atmosphere category. They are given for building designs that are capable of tracking building performance, managing refrigerants in order to reduce CFCs, and renewable energy use.

Many data centers have attained LEED certifications in an effort to curb energy consumption and reduce GHG’s. One of the first data centers in the world to achieve LEED Platinum was the Citigroup Data Center in Frankfurt, Germany, in April 2009. Some features implemented to achieve certification were the use of fresh air free cooling, reverse osmosis water treatment in cooling towers to reduce water use, a vegetated roof, a vegetated green wall irrigated using harvested rainwater, extensive use of server virtualization, and a data center layout that reduces required cabling by 250 km. New data center designs should take these practices and expand on them in order to achieve LEED Certification.

Another internationally used rating system similar to LEED is the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM), which is based in the United Kingdom. As you can see from its title, BREEAM is an environmental assessment method for all types of new and existing buildings that provides best practices for sustainable design. BREEAM has a set of standard categories in which a building can be assessed under called schemes. The array of schemes they provide covers a wide range of facilities, including prisons, schools, offices, and industrial factories. There is incredible flexibility with this system because if there is a building that does not fall under standard categories, BREEAM will develop a customized criterion to evaluate the building. When trying to attain BREEAM certification, the ratings that can be attained include Pass, Good, Very Good, and Excellent.

In 2010 BREEAM has launched its new scheme called BREEAM Data Centres to evaluate the environmental performance of data centers. Data Centers are unique environments as they have limited employees but still use huge amounts of energy. In addition, the intensive energy use will only increase with rising computing needs and demands. According to BREEAM, this new framework could reduce energy use in data centers by more than 50%². Over the next year, it is hoped that this new scheme will be refined even further to provide the design, construction, and operation of data centers with the most efficient and effective standards possible.