Rating System

LEED BD+C: New Construction, LEED O+M: Existing Buildings, LEED BD+C: Core and Shell, LEED BD+C: Schools

Rating System Version

v3 - LEED 2009, v2 - Schools 2007, v2 - LEED 2.2

Inquiry

This project is a remodeling of an existing office building that will include the addition of a Data Center. The Data Center will make extensive use of server virtualization to save energy, space and money. Server virtualization is the technique of replacing multiple servers with one server running multiple "virtual servers" on one larger, high performance server. In their existing Data Center, our client runs an average of 8 virtual servers on each high-performance server. Although the high performance server uses more energy than any one of the low to medium performance servers that it replaces, this results in a net energy savings of between 60-75%. Our question is: Under EAc1, Option 1, may we use the Exceptional Calculation Method to model the energy savings accountable to server virtualization?