Barclays data centre tackles environmental concerns

Barclays' Gloucester data centre to cut electricity consumption by 13.4%

Barclays hopes to cut energy consumption and carbon emissions in its new Gloucester data centre by 13 per cent by using HP's Dynamic Smart Cooling technology.

The new data centre, expected to be operational by February 2009, will use HP's environmental sensor system to cool hundreds of HP BladeSystem servers and will be the first in Europe to use HP's cooling technology, said Elaine Heyworth, head of environmental management for Barclay's retail and commercial bank.

"Our engineering team went out to HP California to see what they were doing, and were able to assess exactly how much each server will need to cool it down. Some 13.4 per cent energy savings is the figure they came back with that we could commit to, but we expect it to be much higher," she said.

The system measures the temperature of individual server racks and instructs a central console to increase or decrease cooling automatically to balance resources and save electricity. Barclays has committed to reducing its carbon footprint by 7,470 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year across the entire group.

"Customers are requesting us to be more environmentally friendly. Obviously there is a cost saving, but there is also a legal element – EU laws in the future will be far tougher on energy use and how we manage our CO2 emissions, " said Heyworth.