(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Telecommunications provider NTT America (www.nttamerica.com) announced on Wednesday that its data center in Ashburn, Northern Virginia has earned a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold Certification from the US Green Building Council (www.usgbc.org).
LEED is a green building rating system developed by the USGBC and is a nationally recognized benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings.
The LEED system awards points for adhering to specified green criteria to address human and environmental health, including sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality and innovation and design.
The Council is currently working on updating its building rating system, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, to address data center developers and their specific design considerations, particularly in relation to energy efficiency.
In addition to being LEED Gold certified, the Ashburn data center will attain SAS 70 Type II status as of October, and has infrastructure topology consistent with the criteria of the Uptime Institute’s Tier III classification and performance standard.
The company has been rapidly expanding its data center footprint in the past couple months, adding two data centers in the Silicon Valley area – one in San Jose and another in Santa Clara.
“We are very proud to announce the LEED Gold Certification of our Ashburn facility,” says Tarif Abboushi, vice president of data center infrastructure at NTT America. “The certification enables us to provide our customers with access to a state-of-the-art green facility. The certification also demonstrates our commitment to environmental stewardship and represents significant progress against the goals of our Corporate Green Initiative.”
The certification is just one part of NTT America’s overall green approach to hosting. The company offers Carbon Balanced Hosting, a carbon offset program that lets customers offset the carbon footprint of their IT equipment by purchasing credits, as well as uses energy efficient servers and more efficient air flow management in data centers, deploys alternative power supplies, participates in recycling company-wide, and subsidizes mass transit and telecommuting.
