By Emily Chia | Mar 23, 2009

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The developers of Malaysia’s GTower started designing the building with one focus in mind: to build an environmentally-friendly structure that will cut its carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere when building is complete in June 2009.

GTower integrates offices, hotel rooms and club, food and beverage and recreational facilities to provide a holistic and conducive working environment for temporary, short-term and long-term business people.

It is designed to maximize energy and water efficiency, and provide high standards in indoor environmental quality.

Today, based on this building concept, GTower is the first and only Malaysian corporate office to be rated Grade A++, with one “plus” for achieving an international “environment-friendly” standard from Singapore’s Building & Construction Authority (BCA) Green Mark GOLD certification (provisional), and another “plus” for Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC)-compliant building and connectivity specifications.

Establishing the foundation

Colin Ng, executive director, GTower, recognized that green IT technologies were a necessary step to achieving the environmentally-friendly building concept.

At that point, Ng had to find a way to balance the deployment of more IT infrastructure to meet the growing needs of businesses while also keeping strict control over skyrocketing energy costs.

He believed green IT was the best possible option available to help him make the necessary cost cuts across many areas.

His alternative solution, had the business not deployed the green technology, was to purchase more servers, obtain more physical space for the servers, increase cooling systems in server rooms, and employ more staff to maintain the servers.

“We felt that the alternative solution would merely have been a temporary measure as business needs are ever-changing. We would have been caught in a catch-22 situation if we had chosen the alternative solution.”

He explained to management that by deploying green IT, the business would be able to lower capital cost.

“We would be focusing on a single server instead of having to support multiple applications. On top of that, maintaining a smaller number of servers that deliver more performance per watt would result in lower power and administration cost.”

He urged the management to consider that every watt of power that dissipates in the data centre turns to heat and it would take another watt for the cooling system to remove that heat.

The green option

Ng is pleased that the solutions GTower has implemented so far is helping to reduce carbon footprint that contributes to global warming and pollutants that arise from improper IT-related waste disposal.

GTower’s intelligent building infrastructure includes fully redundant fibre-optic and Cat 6 cable for connectivity, IP-based intelligent applications, a dedicated data centre and 24/7 on site technical support. GTower will adopt smart card and RFID technologies, as well as true multimedia convergence for IPTV (Internet Protocol television), video on demand, data services, IP telephony and other IP based applications.

These IP-based applications sit on its 3Com Intelligent Building Solutions (3CiBS) backbone. 3CiBS will help to reduce power consumption and carbon emissions, whilst providing optimal power and networking capacity.

Deciding factors

Looking back, Ng said GTower’s selection criteria for green IT solutions was based on efficient usage of energy without hindering operational performance or functionality, while optimizing costs for an organization.

“For GTower tenants, the energy-saving measures and plug-and-play infrastructure of the 3Com Intelligent Building Solutions offers a pay-per-use model ultimately resulting in greater savings,” said Ng.

And by reducing electricity consumption, 3Com’s technology helps GTower’s tenants reduce capital and operating expenditures.

“We started this green and intelligent initiative some three years ago, whilst the building concept was still evolving. In light of the recent electricity price rises, our green investment will see much faster payback than planned,” added Ng.