Oct. 2, 2008 - Fujitsu's newly renovated green datacenter in Sydney, Australia, boasts a cooling system that cycles chilled water throughout the facility, reducing water use by 80%.

The new cooling system employed in the three-storey, purpose-built structure is also expected to consume 32% less energy while maintaining the facility at an industry standard of 23 degrees Celsius and 50% humidity.

The facility also features an auto-sensor lighting system that activates lights only when needed, reducing usage by up to 60%, and the ability to proactively manage the entire facility from a central location.

"The state-of-the-art building control management system allows us to monitor power consumption around the facility in real-time and adjust settings to maximize efficiency," says Michael Gunton, general manager of datacenter services. "This, coupled with the introduction of biometric and other security technologies, plus an infrastructure upgrade to meet the Tier III standard of the Telecommunications Infrastructure Association standard for datacenters, means this center delivers an unprecedented level of efficiency, reliability, security and sustainability to match the leading datacenters anywhere in the world."

The Sydney datacenter, newly reopened after eight months of renovations, delivers measurable savings for Fujitsu customers as well, according to Gunton.

"Most customers can expect a cost saving of around 20% on their datacenter costs as a result of the innovations we have employed in this facility," says Gunton. "We will not only report on each client’s individual power and cooling consumption for their datacenter operation, but will convert that into greenhouse emissions as part of our environmental accounting service."

Fujitsu has yet to announce whether it will seek green building certification under the Green Building Council of Australia.

Companies around the world are now pitching their datacenters for green certification. An HSBC datacenter in London recently received the U.K.’s first "Excellent" rating under the Building Research Establishment’s BREEAM green-building certification. In the U.S., IT provider ADC is pouring $100 million into a datacenter that has already earned LEED Platinum pre-certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.