No Wall Street firm could declare its data center truly "green." After all, a fully loaded data center draws somewhere between 7 and 40 megawatts (millions of watts) of electricity, enough to power thousands of homes. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the energy consumption of the nation's data centers will exceed 100 billion kilowatt hours by 2011, ringing up annual electricity costs of $7.4 billion.

But some data centers hog less energy than others (see related article on Citi's LEED-certified facilities). And although most firms have ditched the unrealistic phrase "green IT" for the more practical (and perhaps deliberately vague) moniker "sustainable IT" -- sustainable in the sense of its impact on the environment and budgets -- they are achieving real efficiencies.

Wall Street firms are deeply engaged in virtualization, consolidation and other energy-efficient initiatives; they're even shutting down entire data centers, turning off servers and desktops when they're not in use, and keeping their trading floors cool and energy-efficient with virtual desktops. Such efforts are not only helping to keep energy bills in check, they're helping firms handle some of their biggest IT issues: diminished budgets, still-rising transaction and data volumes, reduced staff, and the requirement to do more with less.

"The benefit of sustainability is that from a hardware perspective it tends to be less expensive, and there's a great deal of value in that," says B. Gordon Green, VP of Bank of New York Mellon's technology services group. "Technologies such as lower-cost power supplies, more-efficient chips and blade servers have gone toward reducing overall hardware costs."

These efforts tend to start in the data center but spread to other parts of the IT organization. "IT sustainability is more than just data centers," notes Jim Carney, senior executive in Citi's technology infrastructure group.

"We look at data centers as the core of our infrastructure; in many of our energy-efficient initiatives the data center is the heart and soul of the organization," Carney continues. "But we also run a large desktop strategic initiative, in which we put thin clients on the desktop and bring desktop computing assets back to the data center. [And] we're giving employees the ability to work from home or at alternative locations."

In addition to following LEED recommendations in its data centers and consolidating its data center footprint from 52 sites in 2005 to 14 strategic centers and 10 satellites by 2010, Citi also has aggressive server and desktop virtualization plans that should help it meet its goal of an overall 10 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2011, Carney adds.

Powering Down

The single most effective action a firm can take to save energy is neither high-tech nor glamorous: Turn off (or put to sleep) servers that are not being used. "It's not fancy, it's not elegant, and it doesn't sell any hardware," points out independent technology consultant Neal Nelson. "It's a really boring, common-sense thing that will result in energy savings."

In fact a recent study from the University of Michigan found that technology that enables servers to nap when they're not busy could save 75 percent of the energy they consume. The researchers noted that data centers waste most of the energy they draw because they are built to handle peak processing demands.

Yet the technology to turn servers off and on within milliseconds or microseconds is still under development. There's also a psychological barrier: "The idea of putting a server to sleep makes people nervous," BNY Mellon's Green points out.

But the concept is already being applied successfully to desktop computers. At Bank of New York Mellon, desktop power management is one of two major IT sustainability strategies as the organization continues to merge the infrastructures of the former Bank of New York and Mellon.

"If you think in terms of where technology tends to draw power, everybody focuses on the data center, but we've got over 50,000 desktops deployed globally, and each of them draws a substantial amount of power every day," relates Green. "It's not uncommon for them to be left on overnight, which means they're drawing a lot of power when nobody's using them. We've been looking at aggressive approaches to reducing those power requirements."

According to Green, who notes that the company already takes advantage of free approaches, such as the Energy Star recommendations for machine settings, BNY Mellon is testing and evaluating products that completely shut down desktop computers overnight, waking them up only for needed software distributions. These tools will also shut down computers during the day after 15 minutes of non-use, yet quickly boot them back up again when they're needed, he explains, adding that while the firm has not selected a solution yet, it expects to save $125,000 a month through the energy-efficiency of these tools. (In a separate example, J.P. Morgan Chase executives report that the company is rolling out NightWatchman software from 1E in a similar initiative to automatically power down PC workstations overnight.)

But would BNY Mellon deploy such energy-saving controls in a trading environment? "There are going to be places where we have to be careful," Green hedges. "But all things considered, after the traders go home, I wouldn't feel uncomfortable making sure their machines are [powered] down. I would want to make sure their computers come up again an hour before they arrive and need to actually get on the markets."

At the moment, Green reports, BNY Mellon's power management project is strictly for desktops. But one of the benefits of centralizing the control of desktops, he says, is new energy consumption reporting tools that will also work for servers, storage and network devices, and printers.

Extreme Virtualization

While simply turning off unused equipment may be the best step toward energy savings, server virtualization also offers tremendous efficiencies. The trend toward server virtualization, which allows more work to be accomplished on fewer servers, has spread across the Street and many other industries primarily as a way of saving money and easing provisioning.

At Citi all new servers are deployed as virtual machines, with exceptions made for instances where technical limitations impact application performance, according to the bank's Carney. As a result, the firm reports, more than 18 percent of Citi's North American server footprint is virtualized. Citi has more than 2,000 virtual instances and generates more than 100 new virtual machines a week globally. Through these efforts it has realized savings of $1.6 million in power and cooling alone (not including hardware cost savings).