Networking equipment vendor Brocade held an official opening ceremony for its new headquarters and data center in Silicon Valley. The event was attended by local and state officials ÔÇô such as San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed ÔÇô as well as the company's partners in the private sector, including Tom Werner, CEO of SunPower, a manufacturer of solar-power equipment that provided a 550kW solar-panel system for the new headquarters. 

The 562,000 sq ft campus consists of three office buildings and a data center. The vendor's intention was to design a maximally sustainable campus, which can serve as a showcase for "clean tech" design and operation and latest IT technologies. The solar-power installation is one of the largest solar-power deployments in the City of San Jose. 

The US Green Building Council has certified the campus as LEED Gold, according to a statement by Brocade CEO Mike Klayko, and PG&E ÔÇô the large northern-California utility that supplies power to the campus ÔÇô has approved a rebate of up to $2.2m to the company as part of its incentive program to encourage customers to save energy. 

Steve Malnight, a VP within PG&E's Customer Care organization, said this would be one of the largest incentive checks the utility had ever signed. "Thank you for the demonstrated leadership (in showing) what the sustainable future looks like," he said. 

One of the buildings on campus contains both the new data center that supports Brocade's research-and-development organization and provides IT services for the entire campus, as well as a laboratory environment for customers to test the company's products before deploying them in their own data centers.

"Think about this whole building as one data center," said Michael Hirahara, Brocade's VP of global real estate and facilities. End-users can get up to one week at the Solutions Center, with access to both the test environment and assistance from Brocade engineers. 

Click here to read a DatacenterDynamics article about the new data center, including a video tour.