Sustainability Spotlight: Portland

Aaron Binkley, VP Sustainability, Digital Realty
September 19, 2023

Today’s enterprises face ever-changing data, control, and networking demands. At the same time, many business leaders seek to better incorporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives into their strategies to improve their impact on organizational value. As Bjoern Stengel, IDC’s global sustainability research lead, revealed, “Operationalizing ESG is the next maturity step for organizations’ sustainability journey and requires a technology-enabled infusion of ESG into every part of the organization.”^*

Digital Realty is a leader in green data centers
Our customers choose to partner with us because we help to lower costs, are energy efficient, and are certified. In fact, we are the first data center provider to offer certified 1GW IT capacity with sustainable standards. We’re also proud to be:

• The only data center provider to receive:
  • The 2022 EPA ENERGY STAR® Partner of the Year
  • Sustained Excellence Award
  • The 2022 Green Lease Leader, Platinum Award
• Able to continue to garner recognition and awards, such as:
  • Newsweek’s Most Responsible Companies 2022
  • JUST Capital’s America’s Most JUST Companies 2022 – Top 100
• EPA Green Power Partnership’s Top 10 Tech and Telecom List

And we’re just getting started.

Leverage our strategic location: Portland, Oregon
Located in the heart of the Silicon Forest, the center of tech innovation in Oregon, our Portland data centers provide a growing ecosystem of over 20 network, enterprise, IT, cloud, financial partners, and providers, with access to key fiber routes to Asia. The Portland metro enables a diversified, neutral connectivity platform, best-in-class security, and resilient infrastructure to ensure physical security and an industry-leading data center uptime.

Our PDX12 center was purposely designed, built, and operated according to our commitment to building sustainable data centers and reducing our carbon footprint. For example, the building does not use water for cooling IT equipment in suites with air-cooled requirements. Indoor potable water use is 52% lower than a baseline design, and landscape irrigation is supplied by non-potable water. All our plumbing fixtures are low-flow, appliances are energy star certified, and our lighting is all LED fixtures. In addition, the Pacific Northwest weather allows for more “free-cooling” days whenever the outside air temperature is below a certain point, saving thousands of hours over the course of a typical year and resulting in improved Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), even exceeding our 10% PUE reduction goal by using Schneider Electric’s PME software in customers’ suites. Our collaboration with Schneider Electric demonstrates that the right partner makes a difference in helping empower sustainability for all.

Go Green and Go Global with PlatformDIGITAL^®
PlatformDIGITAL is our global data center and connectivity platform. This data-centric architecture offers tailored deployments at any size, scale, and right-sized connectivity options.

With PlatformDIGITAL, top international brands can:

• Optimize network performance
• Enhance security and infrastructure management
• Deploy, connect, and host critical data infrastructure

Explore Portland

Dive into PlatformDIGITAL

You can find more information about our global sustainability commitments in our annual corporate sustainability report.

*Stengel, B. (2022, December 5). IDC futurescape: WW Sustainability/ESG 2023 predictions. IDC Blog. Retrieved from blogs.idc.com