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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- As data center developers continue to lead the way in environmental building, the US Green Building Council (www.usgbc.org) plans to update its building rating system, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, to address their specific design considerations, providing a more accurate reflection of their energy efficiency.
LEED technical development vice president Brendan Owens said USGBC is considering tailoring the LEED rating system to evaluate green data centers, according to a Reuters report. The non-profit organization is also working with groups including The Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org) to establish technical benchmarks for green data centers.
LEED specifications have traditionally focused on five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality. Some of these criteria do not work for data centers, which have very few - if any - on-location staff. Guidelines such as LEED's encouragement of builders to use natural light, and include many windows, doesn't make sense for data centers, which don't require much lighting and windows can cause heat and cooling losses.
Accurate certification standards have been becoming increasingly important for data centers, which consume about 1.5 percent of the country's total electricity use, according to US Environmental Protection Agency estimates, and it's expected to exceed three percent by 2011.
Earlier in the week, wholesale data center provider Digital Realty Trust (www.digitalrealtytrust.com) earned a Gold LEED certification for commercial interiors (known as LEED-CI) for its 1500 Space Park facility in Santa Clara, California, making it the first building in Santa Clara to earn a LEED Gold certification.
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Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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