Qube’s new Zurich data centre facility, e-shelter Zurich, was recently mentioned in an article on the Data Center Knowledge website as being one of only 12 LEED Platinum Data Centers in the world at the present time. e-shelter Zurich is the only LEED Platinum certified data centre in Switzerland and one of only two data centres outside of the USA that are LEED Platinum certified (the other is located in Germany).
The Platinum rating is the highest level attainable under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program, a voluntary rating system for energy efficient buildings, overseen by the US Green Building Council.
The new e-shelter Zurich data centre was designed from the outset to ensure innovative and efficient use of all resources. For example, all non-potable water at the facility is recycled, meaning when you flush a toilet in the facility, the water used is “grey water” collected from catchment areas on the roof of the building. The building also features a high temperature heat pump that enables generation of hot water for non-data centre purposes and allows the “waste heat” from servers to be piped into surrounding office buildings for heating during winter.
The facility also makes use of “free cooling”, a data center cooling technique that takes advantage of the cool Swiss winter climate to bring in filtered cold air from outside, cooling servers and IT equipment without the need to use power-hungry cooling plant for most of the year. Typically, cooling plant in data centres makes up a large percentage of the overall facility power consumed. During warmer summer months, normal forced cooling automatically takes over until the ambient outside air temperature reaches a level where free cooling becomes possible again overnight when the air temperature drops.
The data centre’s utility power is also certified by its power suppliers to be 100% generated by hydro-electric power stations. This means that customers using Qube’s Switzerland Cloud Hosting platform can be assured that they have a minimal impact on the environment with far lower CO2 emissions.
Read the full article Data Center Knowledge here: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/leed-platinum-data-centers-cont/