Google has posted on their achieving ISO 14001 and OSHAS 18001 certifications for environmental and safety standards.
All of our U.S. owned and operated data centers have received ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001certification. We’re the first major Internet services company to gain external certification for those high standards at all of our U.S. data centers.
In a nutshell, both standards are built around a very simple concept: Say what you’re going to do, then do what you say—and then keep improving. The standards say what key elements are required, but not how to do it—that part’s up to us. So we set some challenging goals for ourselves, and we asked our auditors to confirm that we’ve followed through on them.
Two improvements listed are in diesel generator maintenance and handling of batteries.
Here’s an example of the kind of improvements we’ve implemented: Like most data centers, ours have emergency backup generators on hand to keep things up and running in case of a power outage. To reduce the environmental impact of these generators, we’ve done two things: first, we minimized the amount of run time and need for maintenance of those generators. Second, we worked with the oil and generator manufacturers to extend the lifetime between oil changes. So far we’ve managed to reduce our oil consumption in those generators by 67 percent.
A second example: each of our servers in the data center has a battery on board to eliminate any interruptions to our power supply. To ensure the safety of the environment and our workers, we devised a system to make sure we handle, package, ship and recycle every single battery properly.
Joe Kava and a few other Googlers are featured in this video discussing the achievement.
Check out this Google logo with a tree for letter "l" and moon hovering.
This is the closest to a tour of inside a Google data center many will get.
What is more important a LEED certification or meeting environmental and safety standards? Google has hopefully woken up some data center decision makers that there is more to being a green data center than a low PUE and LEED certification.
I am curious on how many views this video will get through out the day. so far it has 201.
