Going “green” has become the initiative du jourfor many companies, as environmental campaigns trumpeteco-friendliness and businesses face heightened energy costs.For Wells Fargo, the San Francisco-based financial servicesfirm with $540 billion in assets, the effort began four yearsago, before the hype, when growth forced the company toexpand its data center capacity.
But it wasn’t all about the environment: Bob Culver, seniorvice president of Wells Fargo’s technology information group,says the firm’s top priority was to ensure security and availabilityof the services it provides, which include consumerbanking, investments and mortgages.
In the process of building two new data centers, though,Wells Fargo put in place a number of energy-saving features tolower power consumption and reduce costs. It accomplishedboth—and there hasn’t been an outage yet.
“They’ve performed the role we expected them to perform,so there haven’t been any surprises,” Culver says.
The firm opened new, high-density facilities in Minneapolis(in August 2005) and Tempe, Ariz. (about six months later).Both facilities house 7,000 to 8,000 servers from Dell,Egenera, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and other vendors.
Standardizing on a particular brand has not yet been anoption, Culver says. Over the years, Wells Fargo has developedpurchasing agreements with various vendors, particularlyHewlett-Packard and Dell, and also has an enterpriseagreement with IBM that includes mainframes and servers.
But consolidating with one vendor won’t be considered whileall those varied servers are still operational, he says. On top ofthat, certain business lines required specialty systems, leadingto more vendors entering the fray.
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