Zhu Weixiong from HP: Where Does Financial Green Informatization Begin?

With increased awareness of social responsibility and the gradual fine-tuning of environmental and economic sustainable development regulations, various financial organizations and major market players are probing into and attempting different ways of realizing social responsibilities in different areas. Paying attention to the protection of the environment and the treatment of pollution during business practices and facilitating the sustainable development of society by guiding the direction of social resources is now becoming a trend.

As early as in 1992, UNEP set up the UNEP FI, whose aim is to spread and popularize the concept of sustainable finance and urge the sustainable development of financial institutions. At present, over 170 organizations worldwide, including banks, insurance companies, fund management organizations and investment consultant companies, have become members. According to a survey by the organization, financial institutions in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia are placing an increasingly large emphasis on the development and promotion of green financial products. The Kyoto Protocol approved in December 1997 states that all protocol countries must meet greenhouse gas emission reduction targets from 2008 to 2012.In June 2003, 10 major global banks from 7 countries announced the Equator Principles. This is a set of voluntary principles concerning social and environmental issues formulated for commercial bank management and project financing. In the future, all the project financing of these banks that exceeds 10 million dollars, regardless of where, must abide by these principles. On February 25, 2008, the State Environmental Protection Agency (now known as the Environmental Protection Department) formally launched “green securities policy”. With this, “green credit”, “green insurance” and “green securities” supported by banks, insurance companies and securities companies have been taking shape.

Green finance not only implies the finance industry’s support of enterprises and projects that emphasize environmental protection, but also means that the finance industry needs to save energy and reduce consumption in the course of its own activities. Therein, “green” solutions in financial informatization are especially worth paying close attention to.

Green information technology has an obvious effect on the finance industry in improving service quality and energy saving & consumption reduction. For example, in a bank in Europe, 5000 sets of blade servers have been installed. But the performance is still unsatisfactory, in the meantime, a great deal of electricity is wasted and space has not been well utilized. Therewith, HP provided data center evaluation and planning services, readjusting the data center in the best way and installing an HP water-cooling machine cabinet in the new data center. In the end, client installed another 1000 sets of blade servers without enlarging the space, thus improving server room density by 31%; meanwhile, the new data center applies 22KW HP water-cooling machine cabinets for the 10,000 blade servers deployed, which greatly improves the energy efficiency in the data center.

Accompanying the trend of green informatization, the finance industry has many technical needs, including new generation data centers, virtualization, the latest cooling and power supply technology, software and services.

Virtualization solutions have recently been a key issue in finance industry informatization. Virtualization technology dates back to the virtual partition technology of mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, IBM invented virtual operation system technology, which allowed many operation systems to run on one host machine so that users could utilize the mainframes, which were hugely expensive at the time. Following this, mainframe technology began to move to small machines or Unix servers. Soon after, HP, IBM and Sun all introduced virtualization technology into their own high-end RISC server systems. By helping financial enterprises gather various resources in a resource pool, resources can be reallocated based on business priority. HP virtualization solutions solves the problem that each IT system can only support a single application. At the same time, it frees-up the data center’s resources, realizes the strong flexibility of the data center in the face of demand and solves the problems of business continuity and availability. HP management solutions allow finance enterprise’s IT organizations to link IT and business in consummate fashion, thus providing business with dynamic support. In addition, virtualization can save a great deal of energy consumption by means of server and storage equipment integration, for example, electricity costs can be cut by 30%-40%.

New generation data centers involve more prospects for energy saving and consumption reduction through informatization, and in the meantime, fully meet the urgent need for data centers brought about by business and data centralization in the finance industry. New generation data centers adopt six key technology innovations, namely IT system and service, power supply and heat radiation, management, safety, virtualization and automation to solve common problems seen in data centers at present, such as rapid cost increases, increasingly complex resource management, information safety and environmental protection. New generation data centers will replace high cost IT "solitary islands” with IT resource pools; an automatic, 24-hour unattended computer environment will become one of their important features.

Comprehensive green energy saving solutions is also a key issue in green financial informatization. These energy saving and consumption reduction designs involves all aspects of IT infrastructure, including server level technology, storage level technology and data center technology, and even services for energy-saving optimization. For example, HP launched a full green energy-saving solution “from chips to coolers” oriented towards entire data centers. Through rationally deploying HP energy-saving solutions, like adopting energy-saving servers, storage equipment, modular heat radiation systems (water-cooling machine cabinet), virtualization technology, data center heat current modal analysis and dynamic intelligent heat radiation technologies, a typical data center make significant energy savings of up to 60%.(source: CCIDNET)