Data centers in a century-old campus
Raymond Parpart first sought out DEEP's services after The University of Chicago notified him that his data centers had shot up in terms of their overall power usage, from #12 to the campus' fourth-largest consumer of energy. "Everybody said, 'What is going on?'" Parpart explained. "We need to figure out how to improve this."
The University of Chicago has six separate data centers spread across three separate buildings, all of which belong as part of the university’s 132-year-old campus. Despite ostensible concerns about the older infrastructure surrounding these data centers, however, it became clear that the data center staff wanted their sustainability practices to be as up-to-date as possible.
We spoke with Parpart to learn more about the unorthodox methods his team used to enhance his data centers' sustainability, and how a DEEP certification highlighted areas of improvement to further improve efficiency.