Deutsche Bank: Blades Key To Green Data Centres

Well planned deployment of blade servers is a key strategy for improving the energy efficiency of data centres according to the chief technology officer of financial services giant Deutsche Bank.

Speaking at the Green IT ’09 conference in London on Wednesday, Stuart Hasking, chief technology officer, architecture and engineering, for Deutsche Bank, said that providing they are deployed in the right way, blade servers can significantly improve the efficiency of data centres.

“I am a big fan of blades which are very much the best way to get the most out of the energy coming into the data centre,” he said.

However, although Hasking said that blade servers provide the most computing power for energy used in his experience, the technology has to be deployed in the right way as the devices produce more heat in a smaller area than traditional servers. “ The challenge with blades is around cooling and that has caused us to re-think a lot of our data centre design,” he said.

Hasking explained that most companies opt to build new data centres not because they have run out of space in existing sites but because of other limiting factors such as cooling.

“Very few companies run out of data centre space -typically they run out of some other resource in that space. It is likely to be the density at which they can provide aspects of cooling to specific areas of that data centre,” he said.

The Deutsche Bank chief technology officer was at the two-day conference in London’s Business Design Centre to discuss the financial services company’s strategy around green and sustainable technology.

Hasking admitted that given the global recession, the banking group is focused on “eco” approaches to tech but “eco” as in “economic” rather than “ecological”.