Sentinel Data Centers said today that its new NJ-1 data center in Somerset, New Jersey has earned a Gold level precertification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)  program, a voluntary rating system for energy efficient buildings overseen by the US Green Building Council.

The 330,000 square foot NJ-1 facility is currently under construction and expected to open for business in January, 2011. Sentinel said its NJ-1 is the first data center or colocation facility in the greater New York region to earn a LEED Gold designation, citing data from the Green Building Certification Institute.

Capturing Economic Benefits of Efficiency
“A LEED Gold designation does not in and of itself provide tangible value to our tenants,” said Josh Rabina, Co-President at Sentinel. “However, we are proud of the achievement in that it provides further verification that we are building the most energy efficient product in the market and enabling our tenants to garner all the economic benefits of this efficiency.”

Sentinel said the LEED Gold level pre-certification was driven by steps to reduce the building’s use of power and water. The data center is designed to incorporate “free cooling” via a highly flexible set of water side economizers and employs chillers, motors, transformers and UPS systems with best-in-class efficiency levels.

The NJ-1 facility will feature water treatment technology that reduces condenser water consumption, and an energy monitoring platform that enables each facility tenant to
granularly track power consumption, cooling performance and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metrics in real time.

Efficiency, But Not Tradeoffs
“Our design philosophy is to optimize energy efficiency to the point where there is no further improvement available without turning to technologies that have reliability trade-offs or are unproven over long durations in the field,” said Paul Hines, Sentinel’s VP of Engineering and Operations. “We always keep perspective on the fact that our most critical design priority is reliability.”

Sentinel has  dedicated on-site 69kV power substation, which will be supported by diverse paths from two transmission-grade utility switching stations, providing more than 40 megawatts of power to the facility.

The first phase of Sentinel’s Somerset development will offer 50,000 square feet of server space. When it is completed, the facility will yield 160,000 square feet of computer room space, with data suites ranging from 2,000 to 50,000 square feet or more.

By Rich Miller, September 30, 2010. This article was originally posted on Data Center Knowledge.