By: Nancy Feig
Bank Systems and Technology
http://www.banktech.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205918196&pgno=4
January 29, 2008
One trend that seems to be popping up everywhere, the shift to “going green” and more environmentally-friendly practices, has now been adopted by financial institutions across the country. The main focus of many large banks such as Citi, Wachovia and Bank of America has been to develop more efficient data centers to cut costs as the prices of energy continue to rise. The article asserts that data centers “consume more energy than any other area of the bank” (pg. 1), as these centers contain a great deal of IT equipment and utilize technology to keep this equipment at cooler temperatures.
The driving force behind this seemingly altruistic movement to improve our planet is profit-driven. As firms seek to streamline costs and increase efficiency, it is critical to utilize machines at efficient levels of capacity. Underutilized or idle servers create a huge amount of waste and generate additional (and avoidable) energy and hardware costs. The issue of managing these data centers has become critical to many firms, as “the challenge is knowing what servers you should unplug” (pg.2). In order to assess issues with the data servers, monitoring the system is integral and requires some harmony between the IT and facilities departments. As firms seek to implement greater transparency in their systems, virtualization technology has been on the rise.
Virtualization allows organizations to use one server to run multiple applications, thereby consolidating the number of servers previously needed. This serves to greatly increase efficiency. In addition, organizations usually see a return on their virtualization investment relatively quickly. VMWare is the dominant vendor in the virtualization market, though other firms are aptly moving into the market. In fact, Microsoft plans to unveil a virtualization product later this year. This technology serves to greatly influence the technology sector and it will be interesting to see how different competitors claim market share, particularly as veteran players such as Microsoft enter the market later than other firms.
What I found extremely interesting was the fact that this virtualization software, which is currently offered for over $3,000, will ultimately be free as these programs will be pre-installed in operating systems. This will further enable organizations to “go green” and will have an interesting impact on various organizations, not just in the finance sector.
One last issue raised in the article is the importance of location of these data centers. Post-9/11, these centers need to be located far from the industrial hub of the Northeast and in the more remote areas of
In conclusion, firms moving toward “going green” are also looking for a perception shift. Similar to our first investing challenge, there is a question of whether or not being more environmentally friendly will improve the bottom line. In other words, vice or virtue? In other words, will the public view this shift as just another way to cut costs or as a way to better care for our planet?
