Articles from financetech.com

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 ... (Read Full Article)

Citi has quietly stepped into a leadership role in the "green" data center movement on Wall Street over the past two years. The financial services conglomerate has built three LEED-certified data centers -- LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the U.S. Green Building Council's rating system for designing and constructing energy-efficient buildings -- in Frankfurt; Georgetown, Texas; and Singapore. In April, the Department of Energy and the Uptime Institute recognized Citi -- the only Wall Street firm in the running -- as a finalist for a Green Enterprise IT Award for data center facility design; Uptime also named Citigroup in its 2009 Global Green 100 list this year (along with nine other Wall Street firms). Citi announced in April the completion of the Frankfurt facility, which is the first-ever LEED platinum-certified data center. [Ed. note: Last year we wrote about Advanced Data Centers, which is building the ... (Read Full Article)

When creating earth-friendly data centers, it's important to keep in mind the cost savings that will be gained. (Read Full Article)