California Academy of Sciences leverages IP to cut waste, costs

From top to bottom, San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences (CAS) is shaping up to be the greenest building in The City by the Bay: For example, it’s expected to use 50 percent less energy than California codes allow a standard building to consume. Although some of that greenness can be attributed to factors such as architectural design and usage of clean energy, IT elements are playing their part as well.

Based in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental)-Platinum-rated CAS facility will encompass a museum of natural history, a planetarium, and an aquarium, all under one (living) roof. TEECOM Design Group, based in Oakland, Calif., was enlisted to apply a green mindset to the IT infrastructure of the facility.

[ Learn more about how LEED can reduce energy waste in a datacenter by reading “ADC lands Platinum LEED pre-certification for new Sacramento facility” and “Digital Realty mines energy savings from LEED Gold.” ]

One of the company’s techniques is to eliminate redundant backbone systems by leveraging the network and making them all IP-based, says David Marks, principal at TEECOM. That includes building’s telecommunication systems — which now run over VoIP — as well as security, lighting and temperature controls (including for the fish tanks), and audio-visual. Traditionally, each one of those systems would have required its own dedicated, independent equipment and wiring. “We’ve eliminated redundant systems and different conduits and backbone cabling. All you have in the building now is a data network with a few more connections.”

The approach results in significant savings, according to Marks. “For the AV system, for example, we saved over $1 million in conduits, cabling, and equipment by migrating to the network,” he says. “All the sound and video displays that used to run through proprietary cables can be pushed over the network now.”

Whether this approach yields long-term energy savings is, for the moment, unknown. “Your primary savings come from the reduced amount of product that gets installed there in the facility,” says Marks. “I think it would be interesting to look at: Do IP-based connections use less power than conventional systems?”

Centralizing the various systems within the facility’s two datacenters also eases management, he notes. If, say, an exhibit goes down, it can be fixed quickly in the datacenter with a backup server, rather than requiring an admin to go to the proper floor in search of the rogue server to perform maintenance.

TEECOM has built plenty of redundancy into the system to ensure uptime. Moreover, all of the apps can be accessed via a browser.

Within the Academy’s two datacenters (a pair is necessary due to space constraints), CAS is leveraging some popular and useful green technologies to keep energy waste down. Among them is virtualization in order to “consolidate a number of different applications down to one to just a few servers,” Marks notes.

Moreover, the Bay Area’s mild climate enables them to take advantage of “free cooling” through air-side economizers — a nice alternative to spending thousands of dollars keeping CRAC systems running continually to keep machines sufficiently cool.

The green technologies being put to work at the CAS facility don’t end there: The facility is also finding ways to reduce paper waste. For example, visitors approaching the facility will be able to purchase tickets wirelessly, which not only saves time but saves on tree pulp and ink. Visitors will also be able to download guides onto their portable devices, meaning they can forego picking up a printed version.

[ For other approaches to reducing paper waste at your organization, please read “Follow the paperless trail”. ]

The California Academy of Sciences is expected to open on September 27. For more information, go to calacademy.org.

Ted Samson is a senior analyst at InfoWorld and authors a blog on green-tech trends called Sustainable IT. Subscribe to his free weekly Green Tech newsletter.