Bank Technology News  |  February 2009

By John Adams

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Chris Brown patrols a computer room invisible to most of Alpine Banks of Colorado's staff and probably all of its customers. But for a bank that wears green like a Masters golf champion, some of the institution's most sweeping sustainability measures are happening in IT corridors far away from the firm's other, very public, environmental initiatives.

The $2 billion bank, which has about three dozen branches serving 100,000 customers in western Colorado, recently deployed an automated disk drive utilization platform. While the bank did not reveal specific savings amounts, it has cut its data storage footprint in half, reduced storage costs by 30 percent and sliced more than 20 percent in its power usage and costs in less than a year.

The Nexsan-produced disk drive utilization product, which is integrated with Alpine's Jack Henry ECM system, is equipped with AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) functionality. When systemwide usage falls to a certain level, disk drives are automatically idled, which reduces power and cooling. "The disks are still actually spinning when they're idled," says Bob Wollary, an svp at Nexsan, Thousand Oaks, Ca, which also counts Morgan Keegan as a financial services client on the platform.

Wollary says the disks normally spin at about 7,200 RPMs, and the platform provides various levels of "slowdown" to lower RPM rates based on factors like time of day, volume and preference of the bank. The larger the slowdown, the larger the energy savings and the longer the restart time. A 20 percent savings idles a drive at a rate that can be returned to full power in less than a second, 40 percent savings in a few seconds and 60 percent in about 30 seconds. "It helps us with both our green savings and in availability to users," says Brown, vp of IT.

Disk drive efficiency is a relatively behind-the-scenes strategy for bank that has embarked on an enterprise-wide green building and energy strategy, has its own energy use audited, includes a "green team" as part of its staff, provides links to national environmental organizations on its website and sports a pine tree as part of its corporate logo.

David Miller, an electronic banking officer at Alpine who chairs the bank's green team, says the institution's strategy is a mix of internal study of business practices, education and execution. That's resulted in projects such as replacing all of the lighting in a ten story bank office building to T5 fluorescent lighting from incandescent lighting - a move that cut lighting energy use 50 percent and a year-long initiative to purchase all its power from green sources and putting plants in offices.

These efforts have earned an ISO 14001 certification, or compliance to the International Organization for Standardization's environmental management protocol - a rarity for a financial firm. "The nature of our customer base and their lifestyles makes sustainability a good business case," Miller says.

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