The good news for my team- the data center stayed up 100% of the time. In fact, we lost only 1 rail communications cabinet during 10 hours of an outage.

This means that our phones were up, even when cell phones were not. Our Internet was online and we could communicate with our customers. Our emergency operations center (EOC) was live and effective. I was proud to see NCTD keep bus and rail service in play hours into an outage that was so significant for the region.

More than anything, I know that without the data center project, we would not have achieved this success.

Not everything was smooth and I don’t want to overstate the positives… but I am confident without our green data center, our EOC team would have struggled that much more. So here is to investment in technology and the ability to see a ROI.

I’ve uploaded my APTA presentation about building a sustainable data center to slideshare if anyone is interested.  Clearly NCTD is a pioneer in the transit industry, even if building a sustainable data center is cliche in other industries.  Not one participant in the room had added sustainability as a design criteria when building their data centers.  We’ll see if I made any impression with the community on this issue.

The first of these is that no part of the interior space up for LEED certification can be cooled by a CFC-based air handling system.  Unfortunately our building was constructed years before the non-CFC requirements came into practice and therefore the majority of the facility is in fact in violation of this requirement.  However, we had previously installed two CFC-free air conditioners dedicated for the data center.  Our original plan was to reuse these air conditioners to supplement the cooling in our board room; however, given the LEED requirements we are now going to use one air conditioner for the ambient air handling in the Data Center commercial space, and the other for the Board room.  Had we not possessed these air conditioning units, this would have been the end of pursuing LEED for us.

The second set of requirements that are unforeseen gatekeepers are those around reduction in water use.  Interestingly, we use absolutely no water in the data center as none of our equipment is water-cooled.  We made the mistaken assumption that no water use would be considered a good thing.  We were wrong.  As a result, we are now forced to add in the public shared spaces on the floor for consideration in the commercial space, and then to show not only a reduction down to the required baseline water usage, but then an incremental reduction from the baseline.

Again, this is an older facility, so we have older toilets and water fixtures.  So Mr. Smith is now working on the 5 toilets, 2 urinals, and 5 water faucets we will need to replace to be considered for certification.  I am wondering how the price will impact my overall return on investment calculation.  The cost for the LEED certification itself is approximately $15,000, and now the incremental cost of the water use reduction could be an additional $5,000.   I will refrain from discussing how this is a crappy situation.

To answer this question, I made the decision that logically we would want to spend no more than 1 advertising campaign would cost.  This would be the net cost – in other words, if the LEED portion of this project costs us $20,000 to go through the process, and if our average advertising campaign costs us $5000, then in order to have a $0 incremental cost the investments through LEED would need to save $15,000 through their total lifetime in order to justify the expenditure.  My logic here is that by successfully obtaining an LEED certification for a commercial interior space – the first such certification for NCTD, and for northern San Diego County – I would likely be generating some press and attention through the investment perhaps equivalent to one small marketing push.  The rest of the investment must be justified by some other tangible return.

Brandon and I are working on this question now.  Just for edification, here are the other items we’re considering in order to meet the basic LEED certification requirements:

• Designating some of our parking spaces for carpools or vanpools
• Reusing our interior door from the project instead of purchasing a new one
• Measuring the Solar Reflective Index of the concrete around the building
• Measuring the shade of the trees on the parking lot

To be fair, I understand the need to consider the overall building in this project.   Given that this is a ‘green data center’ that we are building inside of an existing and rather dated facility, the task of addressing all of the needs of LEED may be insurmountable.  Especially considering my desire to also establish the business case for the project beyond the tangible benefits of the data center itself.  In other words – building the case for green instead of conventional data center practice.

Once we have finished the complete ROI analysis, I will post.  Until then, dual flush or low flow?  That is the question…

The floor has no routing or conduit for cabling, resulting in a haphazard approach to cabling in the room:  some racks have cabling in ad-hoc runs constructed above racks, while other systems have random cables under the floor.  This resulted in a relative rats’ nest of cables discovered as we temporarily relocated some of the systems this month. 

Originally we investigated re-using the raised floor; however, to accomnmodate the growth in equipment we desired to extend the room by 2.5 feet resulting in the need to procure raised flooring for another 50 sq ft.  The original manufacturer does not exist anymore, and the product was not something we were able to find on the open market.  I am frankly happy that we were unable to locate a suitable product to go with this system, as it is simply not ideal for our situation.

This work resulted in the team deciding to remove both the existing ceiling and flooring systems.  Our installation approach now is to instead install electrostatic dissipative (ESD) tiles on the subfloor, and a new dropped ceiling system that will provide for a more logical approach to cabling, air handling, and fire suppression.

My first stop in researching materials was again the US Green Building Council website, which described a program from the Resilient Floor Covering Institute(RFCI) called FloorScore.  Much like the scores provided around sustainable forestry processes, the RFCI FloorScore provides guidelines and a mechanism for an independent assessment (through Scientific Certification Systems) of the volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from the materials.  Similar to the VOCs from paints, floor and ceiling tiles – and other industrial products – can come with a large VOC emissions load.  From both sustainability and worker comfort perspectives, choosing products with low VOCs are preferable where possible.

In addition to low VOC, we’re requiring that the selected products contain a substantial percentage of recycled or renewable materials.  We also would like to work with a company that will allow us to recycle all of the flooring and ceiling material from the existing room.

Surprisingly, there are now a wide variety of products on the market that will meet all of our needs, from ESD, to material composition, to recycling services.  My original fear that was in requiring the additional environmental criteria, we would be facing a substantial increase in the project cost.  However, that has not proven to be the case.  Instead we’ve discovered a wide array of companies that have embraced the need for these products and who are delivering a variety of choices to the marketplace.

We have selected a flooring product manufactured by Armstrong for our project.  Not only do these products meet all of the above criteria, but one of their manufacturing facilities is within 500 miles of the NCTD project site.

The purpose of this posting isn’t to market the specific product we’ve selected, but to instead point out that it was possible for us to impose additional purchasing criteria on the project, find products that met the criteria, and to do so in a manner that did not substantially increase our costs.

Our purchasing criteria included:

• Must meet all anti-static or static dissipative requirements for a data center
• Must contain at least 15% recycled materials (would prefer higher percentage)
• Must be FloorScore certified
• Desirable to be sourced within 500 miles of the project site
• Must have low VOC emissions

Dig Deeper

There are a wide array of manufacturers who provide flooring and ceiling products designed specifically to address both the needs of a data center and the environmental purchasing criteria we selected.  Rather than providing product links, instead I would encourage that people review the RFCI and USGBC sites for information about establishing the appropriate criteria for your project.

This week we started investigating the LEED certification process and it was illuminating. For my data center project we only have two options for obtaining the certification- and both are frankly uphill battles.

The first option is for an interior commercial space. Our LEED consultant Brandon Smith believes we may be able to qualify under this program at a basic certified level. Our data center is part of a shared use space in the basement of our building. We lease out the third floor of our facility to at least three other companies. We also share a lunch room in the basement, and lease out another office in the basement to the same companies.

The data center is a separately-accessed space that is one small office on it’s own. I think this is our best shot at certification. Mr. Smith believes our project will garner 47 of the 100 possible points, which would put us right at the certified level.

Our other option is to pursue an Existing Facility Operations and Mainentance certification. This is a more rigorous review that would require us to change out our old whole-building air conditioning units. I cannot see how I can justify this large capital investment on the data center project alone.

We will investigate the possibility of the second certification as part of our larger sustainability plan.

There were some surprises in this evaluation:

• The rather large solar investment in the project- enough to offset 100% of the power needs of the data center – garnered us all of 1 point in the evaluation. The same as reusing our door.
• We received the bulk of our points because of the location of the site and the nature of our business. Being a public transit district and the free transit we offer out employees brought us 6 points. The thought is that commuters will generate a much larger carbon footprint than that of the data center itself.
• We receive no points for reusing the air conditioners. Even though they will be used infrequently in another part of the building, they clearly still pull a great deal of power.

Pursuing the second certification will require significant investment on our part- from changing the toilets and water fixtures, to the cleaning products we use, to changes in out parking lot. It will be an interesting process to determine whether these investments will make sense to our financially strapped organization.

And that brings us to the question of ROI. The certification process will probably cost around $7500 with fees and consulting hours. This is a very small cost on the overall project, but is equivalent to purchasing 3 servers. Will it return as much as 3 servers would? Is there a monetary value to LEED?