BNY Mellon Data Center Gets Energy Star

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded the Energy Star label to BNY Mellon's Northpointe Data Center, located near Pittsburgh. BNY Mellon (BK) is a global financial services firm, handling asset management and securities.

Northpointe, a 71,000-square-foot data center built in 2006, is one of just three facilities to have earned the recently-implemented Energy Star for Data Centers. The others are a NetApp data center in North Carolina and a Consonus facility in Utah.

Team-Wide Focus on Efficiency
A team of professionals from BNY Mellon, Jones Lang LaSalle, H.F. Lenz and Mechanical Operations Company, Inc., worked collectively on the energy efficiency features of the Northpointe data center, while reducing operating costs and cutting greenhouse gas emissions from electrical usage at the facility. The team focused on utility improvements and systems to keep the data center's power and cooling systems in sync with the workload.

The EPA's national energy performance rating system provides a scale from one to 100, which helps organizations assess how efficiently their buildings use energy relative to other buildings nationwide. Only buildings that score a rating of 75 or higher on the rating scale as verified by engineers are eligible.

The new Energy Star for Data Centers rating is a customized version of the EPA’ Energy Star for Buildings program, with some adaptations that recognize the unique power use of data centers. The EPA rating for buildings is usually based on "energy intensity" measured in watts per square foot of space, a measure in which data centers score off the scale compared to most commercial buildings.

'High Standards for Energy Use'
"It's by design that our ongoing sustainability and energy conservation efforts have resulted in this new and significant data center Energy Star designation as we grow our business in an environmentally sustainable way," said Chip Logan, managing director, BNY Mellon facilities services and sustainability. "Together with our partners, we've implemented a program of continuous improvement that supports our high standards for energy use and even higher regard for the environment."

William Stanley, managing director, BNY Mellon Technology Services Group, added, "Sustainability and smart business decisions are a good match. We've adopted new operating solutions to minimize energy use, reducing the overall carbon footprint of this building that have no impact whatsoever on the company's critical information technology infrastructure."

BNY Mellon is also a member of The Green Grid, a global consortium of IT and related companies and professionals seeking to improve energy efficiency in data centers and business computing environments around the world.

The EPA Energy Star for Buildings program maintains a registry of 11,000-plus  commercial properties that have met the stringent energy-efficiency specifications designed to promote superior energy use and performance, and prevent greenhouse gas emissions.