Earlier this month the NetApp Data Center in Research Triangle Park (RTP) in North Carolina became the first facility to earn the Energy Star for Data Centers rating from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The NetApp facility achieved a near perfect mark by scoring a 99 on the 100-point scale used by the Energy Star program.

The RTP facility allowed NetApp to expand its data center capacity to meet its needs through 2019. The 132,000-square-foot building houses a 36,000-square-foot dynamic data center with a designed power load of nearly 25 megawatts. The facility can house 277,000 terabytes of storage, or enough to hold 28,000 copies of the entire contents of the Library of Congress, or about 15.8 million HD movies.

The NetApp data center is distinctive in its focus on airflow management, with a design that completely separates hot and cold air and provides granular control over air pressure throughout the facility. "We were able to start from the inside out and build around the air handlers," said Joe Miller, NetApp's Manager of Facilities Operation at the Research Triangle data center, who provided an overview of the facility at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit last fall.

The following pages provide a closer look at the infrastructure of the NetApp facility, and the design that helped it earn the exceptional rating from the Energy Star for Data Centers program.

Design Overview

The First Energy Star Data Center

Design Overview | Following the Airflow | Data Halls | Server Rooms