Since the completion of the Wells Fargo-Wachovia merger in February of this year, server virtualization and data centre efficiency have replaced integration issues as top IT priorities for the San Francisco bank. In the past few years the US$1.3 trillion-asset bank, under the leadership of Jim Borendame, executive vice president and head of compute platform services, has deployed server consolidation and virtualization, de-duplication, and desktop and power management to reduce energy use, while also reducing the number of satellite data centre locations. He plans to close 12 data centres over the next couple of years

In 2008, the bank opened a power and thermal optimization lab to test how it can use equipment more effectively to save space and power and improve server and storage utilization. "We've given our storage engineering team quite a bit of feedback on how they are consuming storage on a per-terabyte basis," Borendame says. "Right now, I can get 178 terabytes in a square foot, and have increased the power efficiency of that footprint by 85%." In the previous eneration of technology, a mere 93 terabytes could be stored per square foot. The bank is not using super high-end equipment - it's got standard Hitachi, EMC and NetApp storage devices -- but it's engineering and configuring the machines in a way that drives utilization up. 

Source: American Banker