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Wholesale data center provider Digital Realty Trust has earned a LEED Platinum certification for yet another one of its Silicon Valley facilities. The US Green Building Council has issued the certification to DRT’s data center in Santa Clara, Calif. – a second DRT facility to achieve the council’s top-tier recognition for sustainable building practices.
While many commercial buildings in the US and abroad have received LEED Platinum certification, it is a rare occurrence in the world of power-hungry data centers. More common is LEED Gold – a certification one level below platinum.
“Most data center companies approach being green by focusing on issues such as PUE,” DRT CTO Jim Smith said in a statement. “Digital Realty Trust takes a more comprehensive approach by ensuring the sustainability of construction practices, the re-use of existing buildings and energy efficient design principles to complement our facilities’ low PUE ratings.”
PUE (power usage effectiveness) is a widely recognized data center energy efficiency metric that was developed by The Green Grid, an organization that researches and promotes ways to improve the efficiency of energy use by data centers.
The said Santa Clara data center is located at 1525 Comstock St. The facility is next to another LEED Platinum-certified DRT facility at 1201 Comstock St. The latter was the second data center in the US to achieve the top-level recognition for sustainable building practices. The facility has been leased to the developer of computer graphics-related technologies Nvidia.
The first data center to achieve such recognition in the nation was an American College Testing facility in Iowa City, Iowa. It was the world’s second LEED Platinum-certified data center, achieving the recognition several months after a Citigroup data center in Frankfurt, Germany.
One of the 'green' features of Citi's Frankfurt facility (the first LEED Platinum-certified data center in the world) is a wall covered with native plants
Related news: Digital Realty buys new data centers/land in Virginia
Related feature: How to achieve LEED certification
Related video: Interview with DRT CTO Jim Smith
Keywords: Digital Realty Trust, DRT, US Green Building Council, LEED, LEED Platinum, green data center, LEED data center | | 
