Data centres
of the IT equipment.” Some of these challenges can be addressed in its existing data centres. But others require looking into new locations. In general, the bank’s IT workloads aren’t flexible enough to move to new facilities particularly easily. But when it is possible, says Jantarada, it is a boon to everyone’s sustainability agenda. Recently, BNP Paribas teamed up with Dell Technologies and data centre provider atNorth to move a portion of its IT infrastructure to Iceland. In common with many financial institutions, the bank was starting to make use of high- performance computing (HPC) applications. HPC has opened new doors in the financial services industry, enabling banks to analyse massive amounts of data, but it is also energy intensive and requires a significant physical footprint.
“The Iceland project with atNorth is one of our first data centre projects that had a sustainability agenda,” says Jantarada. “When we realised that our HPC farm would keep on growing, we started looking for new locations to spread our risk across multiple countries and improve our energy footprint. To achieve this, we looked at several criteria, such as power efficiency, origin of the electricity, costs, and international connectivity.” Ultimately, the bank decided to house its infrastructure at one of atNorth’s colocation data centres in Iceland. Compared to its previous HPC deployment, the bank says this has reduced energy consumption by 50%, decreased carbon emissions by 85% and moved 100% of the energy supply to renewable generation. “We quickly realised that the country was ticking all the boxes,” says Jantarada. “On an ecological standpoint, Iceland offers two outstanding factors with its energy efficiency, thanks to natural free- cooling and the energy origin, which is 100% natural and renewable.”
Future trends
Cold countries like Iceland and Norway have emerged as a winning choice for data centre providers looking to cool their facilities. Microsoft has even tested an underwater data centre, which takes advantage of the icy subsurface seas around the north of Scotland.
All the same, the use of third-party data centres is not confined to specific geographies – and in fact, balmy South East Asia is currently the world’s fastest-growing region for data centre colocation. That is boosting demand for other green energy solutions like direct liquid cooling.
“This solution has been around for some time now but has now become mandatory in certain conditions,” says Jantarada. “It allows for a better thermal performance in dissipating the heat produced by processors, but also allows for an easier transport and reuse of the heat outside of the facilities.”
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
Top: Alex Rabbets, managing director of the European Data Centre Association.
Below: Ricardo Jantarada, global head of telecom and datacenter at BNP Paribas CIB.
Another trend worthy of note, he says, is heat reuse. In principle, this approach means any data centre could reduce its impact without having to relocate somewhere colder.
“When you consider a data centre as a black box, what it does is take electricity in, and produce heat with it,” says Jantarada. “Reusing this heat in local communities, industries or farms will allow data centres to become more neutral. Obviously, for this to be possible, there need to be specific infrastructures and partnerships between data centre operators and local communities or industries.”
As banks’ data requirements continue to grow, we are likely to see ever more discussion around these issues. Given the right approach to IT infrastructure, more data doesn’t have to necessarily mean a rise in energy use. But that can be hard for a bank to achieve on-site – and that’s where cloud comes in. “It’s interesting to see what extent banks are considering green issues today,” says Rabbetts. “I think they’re starting to look at their resources and realise that they cannot simply offshore the challenges of climate change. They are realising that a cloud-based data centre is always going to be greener.” ●
19% 64.2
zettabytes The total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed in the world in 2020.
The compound annual growth rate of the green data centre market from 2020–2026. Statista
35
European Data Centre Association; BNP Paribas
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