Many financial institutions are finding it hard to reconcile the drive to boost business performance with the green agenda that increasingly dominates business today. But when it comes to data centers and energy consumption, there are plenty of ways that banks can align growth with their corporate social responsibility strategy.

Rick Jacobson Marketing Director - Financial Services Sector Intel Americas

Ciaran Flanagan Data Center Solutions Manager Intel

Financial institutions are hungry for processing performance—and with good reason. Increased competition and market globalization have led to ever-expanding trade volumes and the need for 24-hour, follow-the-sun operations. But as performance increases, so the pressure mounts to demonstrate a coherent response to climate change and other issues associated with energy consumption, especially in modern, high-performance computing data centers.

Turning infrastructure into a core business asset

Until recently, the majority of financial organizations saw the ‘green agenda’ as an inconvenient drain on resources. But more forward-looking institutions are now taking advantage of energy-efficient strategies that also improve performance. These organizations are starting to turn their data centers green using groundbreaking new technologies and strategies that decrease energy use, enhance server performance and contribute to managing costs.

So how, exactly, do financial institutions reconcile their growth and social responsibility agendas to generate business benefits? Success depends on four key areas: grid computing, the use of quad-core processors, energy-efficient servers and a strategic approach to energy consumption.

Achieving efficiencies through new technologies in the infrastructure such as grid computing and virtualization enables improved utilization over today’s often chronic sub-10% levels created by tactical case-by-case accretion of the compute footprint over many years.

Grid computing and virtualization enable advantage to be taken from a common pool of shared IT resources where any application can use available resources or data at any time. This offers an advantage over the dedicated service models traditionally used in the financial services sector, which are designed to accommodate peak demand for each application. This, in turn, makes it difficult for them to support high-performance applications. Not only does the grid computing model deliver higher performance levels, it is immediately more energy efficient because it reduces the amount of servers.

The benefits of multi-core processing

The principal benefit of multi-core processors is that they deliver higher performance levels for less energy. For example, quad-core processors outperform existing systems in three major areas: computer performance, price performance and performance per watt. This has immediate performance and energy efficiency benefits for operating systems and database software, as well as many technical, financial and high performance computing (HPC) applications. Multi-core processors can also increase throughput and increase compute power by up to five times while reducing both energy and space requirements.

Defining the energy efficient server

At present, there are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes an energy-efficient server. Intel has been working to develop a set of guidelines that will help financial institutions make the right decisions about their data center technology. But in general, an energy-efficient server should be able to reduce energy usage for non-compute functions through:

• Deployment of energy-efficient voltage regulators, power supply units and other components;
• Use of energy-efficiency processors manufactured with the latest silicon process technology incorporating advanced power management capabilities;
• Implementation of fine-grained component power management systems such as memory power management;
• Minimal power consumption at system idle;
• Monitoring and policy-based control of platform power consumption;
• Controlling and monitoring peak server power consumption during periods of high demand.

A strategic approach to power consumption

Energy, like any limited resource has a strategic business role. To the extent that once an organization has the right processing and server technology in place, it must address its power consumption. At the compute level, this can pay rich dividends. For example, for every watt saved in computation, two additional watts are saved on power conversion cooling. Consequently, there are significant cost reductions to be gained from even the smallest power savings.

Energy efficiency leads to enhanced performance

Of course there’s more to a green business strategy than reducing energy consumption. But it illustrates a significant turning point as financial institutions face up to the challenge. In short, there’s no reason why green policies shouldn’t be good for business, as well as being good for public relations. It also means that banks can achieve both their data center performance and social responsibility objectives on a single budget. There’s a long way to go yet, but the data center is a good place to start demonstrating your green credentials.

Filed under: Issue 3 - Fall 07