The hundreds of brightly lit computer screens on a typical trading floor consume lots of electricity. But Wall Street's real power lunches take place in its data centers, where canyons of servers gulp roughly eight times more electricity per square foot than do the machines on the trading floor. Powering up servers and then cooling them down so their surroundings don't turn into saunas eats up 30 to 50 percent of a typical financial data center's $10 million to $30 million annual operating budget, says Kfir Godrich, director of technology development at EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a New Yorkbased consulting firm. He notes that power consumption has become a center-stage topic in the past two years.
"In the mainframe age, data center energy consumption was about 35 watts per square foot," Godrich says. "Now it's about 200 watts. A single financial data center typically uses as much energy per year as the African nation of Togo."
Ironically, energy consumption has become an issue just as most computing operations have moved to compact, cheap and efficient servers. Yet as the PC-size units grow in power and shrink in size, more of them are needed to handle Wall Street's increasingly computing-based business lines. Last year alone U.S. banks spent about $1.75 billion on servers, according to Framingham, Massachusettsbased International Data Corp.
"Overcoming the power and cooling obstacles is the industry's greatest challenge," says Steve Yatko, global head of information technology research and development at Credit Suisse, which is addressing the problems in several ways. To cool its headquarters building, which also houses a data center, the bank installed New York City's biggest air-conditioning system that uses stored ice for cooling rather than a continually running refrigeration system -- for which it was honored by New York State in April and received $820,000 in state incentives. By creating ice at night when the demand for energy, and its price, are lower, and allowing the ice to melt and cool the building, the facility will save 2.15 million kilowatts a year.
Over the past 18 months, Credit Suisse has been testing another energy saver: MAID (massive array of idle disks) technology that lets it store more than 1 million gigabytes of data while consuming very little power. The new data storage system doesn't run continuously as most others do; the arrays only spin when reading or writing data, thus using less energy and creating less heat.
Fortunately, initiatives that are good for the environment also make good business sense. Mellon Financial Corp. has rolled up several of its U.S. and foreign data centers into two separate and redundant facilities in the Pittsburgh area. The consolidation and redundancy eliminate the need to power multiple sites, says John Cetorelli, a first vice president at Mellon's IT services group.
Institutions chagrined by underutilization of their servers -- and the economic and ecological costs of running servers below optimal capacity -- are turning to a technique that uses software to mimic hardware. "Visualization," as it is known, boosts the number of applications that can run on a single server.
Mellon is on a mission over the next two years to pile more applications onto its servers, having discovered that each one was operating at only about 25 percent capacity, Cetorelli says. Credit Suisse is making gains in this area too. It now has the equivalent of 30 workstations sitting on each server, up from a ratio of one workstation to one server in the past, says Yatko.
Vendors are promoting conservation as well. In April, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems and chip maker Advanced Micro Devices announced the formation of the Green Grid, a consortium that will explore ways to reduce heating and cooling demands through more-efficient computing design and better data center management.
"No one company is going to solve these issues itself," says Yatko. "We've all got to come together, including our competitors and technology suppliers."
Wall Street appears eager to do its share. "All our clients care deeply about the environment and are looking at all kinds of power sources; one was considering wind power, but local authorities wouldn't permit it," says Godrich.
