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Data centres – where all the serious number crunching for banks takes place – are huge consumers of energy. Recognizing this, many banks have taken steps to outsource data processing to energy-efficient third parties. Citi, which aims to reduce its carbon footprint by 10% by 2011, has kicked off a programme whereby new data centres, office buildings and operations centres will be built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (Leed) certification standards. Plans for the first Leed-compliant data centre were unveiled last year in Germany. It will be Citi’s largest data centre outside the US, covering the entire EMEA region, and is planned to achieve gold Leed status.
“The energy consumption of a data centre is very high,” says Dirk Schubert, head of Citi realty services. “This in turn means that the potential for energy savings is enormous. Our design will enable savings in energy consumption of up to 25% or over 16,000 MW hours annually.”
Ninety-nine percent of the electrical energy used will be green and compared with a conventional data centre, water consumption is reduced by up to 46.5 million litres annually – a 30% reduction. Carbon emissions are reduced by up to 11,000 tonnes annually compared with a conventional data centre.
When selecting materials and deciding on the construction details of the building, Citi also considered the amount of embodied CO2 and reduced it by using ecologically intelligent solutions. For example, the data centre will have a green wall, which is built of plants. And as power consumption of the computer equipment is the primary user of energy in the data centre, Citi will deploy efficient cooling technologies to maintain the required operating environment. The new data centre will only use its cooling towers during the summer months.
Goldman Sachs, which wants to reduce its carbon footprint by 7% by 2012, is also addressing technology-related emissions.
“Most of our newer facilities including the new headquarters are what we call a thin building,” says Timur Galen, head of corporate services and real estate at Goldman Sachs in New York. “Most of the data processing that would in the past have taken place in the building has been exported to be performed in a purpose-built data centre in a less urban location. It’s in that facility where the focus is on the environmental consequence of all of the power consumed for computation.”
Beyond figuring out how many servers can be fitted in one space and the amount of energy that will be consumed to power and cool the space, work is being done to create more efficient servers and chips.
“There’s a lot of focus – we have a group within the company’s technology division that focuses exclusively on the heat that is generated by computation and how to manage that,” says Galen. “In the past, it was one application, one box. Now the boxes are being designed to be many boxes to be able to run many computations which means you’re getting more computation power per watt of electricity consumed. This is an area of real focus, and I would say watch this space because important things are going to happen here.”
