The Greening of Data Centers

Financial institutions such as Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America ($1.3 trillion in assets) and New York-based Citi ($1.88 trillion in assets) have pledged billions of dollars to develop next-generation data centers that are more energy efficient. But their efforts aren't entirely altruistic -- environmentally sustainable data centers carry fiscal benefits, too. To "green wash" their data centers, banks are looking to a number of new technologies, specifically IT asset management, server virtualization and data center cooling solutions.

Why data centers? The data center is the control room for any organization. Data centers also consume more energy than any other area of the organization because they contain both IT equipment and the infrastructure that's needed to cool that equipment. The Environmental Protection Agency found that data centers consumed about 60 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006, roughly 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption.

--Nancy Feig

Courtesy of Bank Systems & Technology, a CMP Technology property.