Fortune Data Centers gets its LEED Gold certification

Data center operator Fortune Data Centers has snagged a Gold rating under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, which is run by the U.S. Green Building Council. The rating covers its new San Jose facility, which can support up to 8 megawatts of power for IT infrastructure.

Fortune's facility is the first LEED Gold-certified data center in the city. Fortune estimates that there are only five Gold data centers in the entire country, but I don't have confirmation of this. The accomplishment is all the most notable, since this facility is a multi-tenant one, not one that is handling just one company's infrastructure.

I wrote about the specific green metrics of this facility back in August, but to highlight:

• The facility uses an overhead approach to cooling, a factor that has contributed to its power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.37 at full load. (The industry average is around 2.0.)
• The construction process itself earned a ton of points toward the certification, with about 96 percent of all the on-site waste either recycled or re-used on site.
• The building materials were heavily weighted toward regional sources and recycled content
• Selection of all the infrastructure, notably the universal power supplies, included stringent green IT metrics