Critical Facilities and the Value of Celebrating OurPlanet - In Honor of Earth Day

On March 19th in 178 territories and countries around the globe, citizens andbusinesses shut off their lights in observance of Earth Hour, an annual event tohighlight the global threat from climate change. International landmarks like TheEiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, Australia’s Sydney Opera House joinedmillions of people in shutting off their lights for one hour.

Friday, April 22nd marks the 46th anniversary of Earth Day and begins anambitious initiative – to plant 7.8 billion trees by the time Earth day turns 50 in2020. Trees help combat climate change, improve air quality, and improvecommunities and we encourage all of our customers and partners to participatein this exciting initiative.

For Earth Day 2016, honor our planet by conserving energy, promotingsustainability, and helping the environment by making small changes. Read tipson how to do so here.

Todd Boucher, Principal

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Leading Edge Design Group

86 Chosen Vale Lane, Suite 201, Enfield, NH 03748

(603) 632-4507

April 2016 | Vol. 2, Issue 4

LEDG Solutions

Leading Edge Design Group is a critical infrastructurespecialist with vendor­neutral solutions for DataCenter, LED Lighting, and Information andCommunications Technology projects. Founded in2007, Leading Edge Design Group helps organizationsdesign, build, and maintain systems that are reliable,scalable, and energy efficient. For more information,please visit www.ledesigngroup.com or follow us ontwitter @ledesigngroup.

Quote of the Month

"People with passion can change the world for thebetter"

­­Steve Jobs

How IT Decisions Impact Your Data Center by Data Center Knowledge

C­suite says IT has to step up to the plate and improve its game

Global business leaders are becoming increasingly frustrated with the ‘out ofstep’ nature of their IT staff as they struggle, and fail, to align IT goals tobusiness ones says a new piece of research from The Business PerformanceInnovation (BPI) Network.

The research finds that the vast majority of business decision makers arededicating more time and attention to understanding the strategic implications ofdisruptive technologies and the more they find out the less they like it.

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In Case You Missed It

­ Market Insights

Facilities Management

China Unveils $50 Trillion Global Electricity Network |NBC NewsLighting Business is Getting Ugly Says Top Analyst | LUXYour State Could Lose Big Bucks By Stalling on CleanEnergy | WiredRevealed: Apple's Not So Secret Energy EfficiencyEfforts | Greentech MediaEnlightened Raises $25M to Turn LEDs into IoT Nodes |Greentech Media

Technology

5 Best Practices to Avoid Emergency Data CenterCleaning | LEDG Forget Consumer IoT ­ Industrial IoT will be theRevolution | Digitalist Growth of Boston's Data Center Market Driven ByBioPharma, Energy Efficiency | JLL BlogGoogle Swears Its Cloud Is Ready for Prime Time |FortuneLook Inside the Rackspace Open Compute Cloud | DataCenter FrontierTake 360­degree video tour of Google's Oregon DataCenter | EngagetSchneider Electric Announces Electric Lithium­Ion BatteryOptions for its 3­Phase UPS Solutions | PR NewswireFacebook Takes Open Compute Hardware to the NextLevel | Data Center FrontierArizona Utility to Build 63 MW micro­grid for On DemandData Center | Utility Dive

Google and Telcos Join Facebook, Microsoft andRackspace to Standardize Data Center Equipment

The Open Compute Project (OCP) is at a pivotal point in OCP’s mission is to

standardize server, storage and data center hardware designs to increase

economies of scale. OCP’s challenge is defining specifications intended for large

scale manufacturing when not all data center companies are participating in OCP.

Microsoft MSFT ­0.15% and Facebook FB ­2.68% are members, and Google

GOOGL ­0.17% started participating in a limited fashion last week, but Amazon

Web Services (AWS) and many Chinese companies, such as Alibaba , Baidu and

Tencent, are not members. Many of these large public cloud service providers

define their own systems; they build their own hardware or order it from leading

ODMs with some feature customization.

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World Switches Off Lights for Earth Hour by USA Today

In 178 countries and territories around the world Saturday, millions of people are switching off their lights for Earth Hour, an annual event to highlight

the global threat from climate change.

Some 350 world landmarks including the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower will go dark for 60 minutes starting at 8:30 pm. local time.

This year's theme celebrates "Places We Love" — the mountains, rivers, beaches, reefs, forests and national parks that organizers say are in peril from

climate change.

Earth Hour is hoping to harness momentum for climate change after world leaders reached a landmark accord in December to lower planet­warming

greenhouse gas emissions.

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Google Joins the Open Compute Project by TechCrunch

Google today announced that it is joining the Open Compute Project (OCP), a five-year-old project founded by Facebook and a number of other companies

that aims to drive IT infrastructure development forward through open source hardware. For Facebook, for example, this has meant open sourcing how it

builds some of its servers and other data center hardware.

Over the last few years, Google also shared some information about how it powers its data centers, but now it has also signed on to work with Facebook

and others to work on the OCP Open Rack project, for example. This project aims to bring 48 volt power distribution to data center racks. Google says it

has been working on 48V rack power distribution since 2010 and, in the process, it found that it was 30 percent more energy-efficient that its previous-

generation 12V systems.

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LED Lighting Retrofits Can Help You Avoid Failures Before They HappenBy LEDG

Out go the lights – now what? LED lighting retrofits can make all the difference.

Facility managers with legacy metal halide lighting systems for high bay applications like manufacturing, warehousing, and athletic facilities are facedwith a challenge: the most effective way to prevent failures of metal halide systems is to proactively change lamps and ballasts. In other words, if onelamp has failed, change all the lamps in the facility as a preventative maintenance measure. Many facilities take this approach due to the difficultly inservicing these lights and the need for lifts, shutdowns, etc.

The alternate approach is to wait until the lamp or ballast fails and perform ‘spot’ replacements. This also presents a challenge as the colortemperature in the new lamp is going to vary significantly from the existing lamps, degrading uniformity and quality of delivered light.

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The State of Data Center Design: 2016by Data Center Frontier

At Data Center Frontier, design is one of the major themes we see shaping the industry. Our thesis: New markets will require new approaches to datacenter design, creating facilities that can operate with very different climate and energy profiles. This will require major innovation in the way datacenters are designed, built and powered.

Over the past year, we’ve interviewed many of the industry’s leading thinkers on design, and developed case studies of how leading companies in ourfield are using design to differentiate themselves and target business opportunities.

Here’s a comprehensive guide to the State of Data Center Design in 2016:

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4 Ways to Minimize Data Center Water Usageby LEDG

A coherent cooling strategy can minimize data center water usage and make your facility more sustainable.

Last year, the State of California battled a massive drought. In April of 2015, California Governor Jerry Brown announced the first­ever statewide waterreduction mandate, which requires cities and towns across the state to reduce water use by 25%. Soon after, the State of North Carolina entered asevere drought stage that lasted for over 6 months, only just ending at the end of 2015.

The impact of the drought conditions and water reduction mandates on the agricultural industries has been widely reported, but the role data centersplay in water consumption gained continued exposure as drought conditions in both states worsened. Water use in the data center has been a centralissue for several years and continues to be a concern.

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Will Power Over Ethernet LED Lighting Be Right For Your Facilityby LEDG

Power­over­Ethernet LED lighting is a strategy that is emerging quickly that may be a future consideration for your facility.

After the announcement of a partnership between Philips and Cisco in December, talk in the lighting industry about the viability of Power­over­Ethernet

(PoE) LED lighting systems has dramatically increased. Although the concept of PoE lighting is relatively new, many believe that PoE will be the

strategy of choice for future intelligent lighting implementations.

LED lighting is uniquely suited to work with Power­over­Ethernet systems. The traditional 120V and 240V AC electrical systems found in commercial

buildings greatly exceed the power that an LED needs to run. Currently, LED luminaires use electronics that convert those voltages down, typically to

12V DC. Ethernet cables can safely carry lower DC voltages (and currently are today for applications like VOIP phones and wireless access points).

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