Data centres
A further misconception comes from extreme claims in the media, including the notion that the internet will consume a fifth of the world’s electricity a decade from now. These reports tend to cite the ‘worst case’ results of outdated studies that often underestimate energy efficiency progress. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about energy use growing in the future as data demand continues to rise,” adds Kamiya. “We need companies and governments to invest in R&D today so that we have more efficient technologies in five or ten years.” Undoubtedly, the Big Tech companies will have the biggest impact on energy use and carbon emissions, but banks are also investing in technology to bring down PUE.
“Reducing our carbon footprint in data centres is typically about improving our cooling efficiency,” says HSBC’s Haynes. “This includes processes and equipment that take more advantage of external cooler air, controlling air flow more effectively around our buildings and use of smarter control units and variable frequency drives to ensure cooling responds as workloads change, such that we don’t overcool. Additionally, it is also about ensuring we rigorously remove or switch off infrastructure that is no longer needed.”
Piloting alternatives
Immersion cooling is one technology that is having a dramatic effect, explaining its popularity across banks. As the power densities of servers grow, there could come a point at which air cooling is no longer effective in dealing with the heat generated by chips.
For example, French bank Crédit Agricole recently completed a two-year immersion cooling pilot project and is now preparing to roll out Asperitas’ take on the systems across its data centre portfolio. The Asperitas modules, built in-house by the Dutch company, encase the servers, immersing them in a cooling liquid that absorbs the heat from the hardware. This liquid conducts heat better than air, so can better handle the growing density that data centres require to cope with computationally intensive applications. “The immersion cooling solution allows us to increase the density of our data centre without major work,” noted Jean Buet, senior officer, head of data centres at Crédit Agricole on concluding the deal. “We can thus offer our customers a high- thermal density solution that meets both their growing demand and the new technological challenges that appear with the new generation of IT equipment.”
In the initial trials of technology, indeed, the bank saw PUE decrease from 1.4 to 1.03 in the winter and 1.04 during a heatwave. This compares to a PUE of 1.11 at Google’s large-
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
“Digital technologies are not a silver bullet for tackling climate change, but strong climate policies and corporate action can help guide their application in the right places to accelerate clean energy progress.”
George Kamiya
Sustainability nevertheless plays a key role in cloud services contracts. The likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google are, Kamiya says, making great efforts to lower emissions. “New digital technologies and applications could have positive or negative effects on energy use and emissions,” Kamiya observes. “Because there are so many indirect effects, estimating the net effects of digital technologies is extremely difficult. Digital technologies are not a silver bullet for tackling climate change, but strong climate policies and corporate action can help guide their application in the right places to accelerate clean energy progress.”
Concerns over carbon emissions from data centres are often overplayed and exacerbate concerns to an unnecessary extent, but there is no excuse for any technology-intensive industry to become complacent – least of all for one as tech savvy as banking. ●
scale data centres. To put it another way, it’s an improvement that could see data centres dramatically reduce their collective carbon footprint.
Carbon control in the cloud For banks, technology will help reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, but operational measures are also fundamental to the industry’s sustainability drive.
ING is among many banks looking to consolidate their data centre estate to maximise economies of scale and improve sustainability. The bank is currently closing local data centres and rehousing data in its core data centres and private cloud infrastructure in Amsterdam. This is first and foremost a cost- and energy-efficiency play. ING, HSBC and others are also partnering with cloud services providers to manage their data needs, improve service, and, of course, save money. “HSBC’s strategy is to make use of public cloud to achieve levels of performance and agility which cannot be achieved on-premises,” says Haynes, “and to adopt a flexible cost model for the benefit of customers, all without compromising on the high levels of security and resilience that our business demands.”
541 Synergy Research Group
Studies by Synergy Research Group identified nearly 400 hyperscale data centres in operation in 2017, rising to this figure by mid-2020.
1.11 Google 21
The average PUE reported by Google across its large-scale data centres.
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