Scottrade Turns Up the Heat, Saves Energy
Temperatures are rising in online brokerage Scottrade Inc.'s data center -- and that's a good thing. The move has allowed the St. Louis-based company to reap enormous energy savings while increasing reliability.
Those changes "improved our power consumption [and] our air conditioning costs, and reduced our total costs of running our business," Patterson says. At Scottrade, low latency is critical to keeping its commitment to completing trades fast. It relies on the highest possible server performance to support split-second transactions for its customers. Fortunately, the redesign required no compromises: Moving to a hotter data center didn't reduce performance or affect the longevity of data center equipment, he says. Instead, he believes the changes improved reliability by keeping equipment within optimal operating ranges.
Patterson is taking the same approach at the company's new backup data center, which is located in Scottsdale, Ariz. Racks are already being assembled in the new facility, and the designs for which servers go into which racks are nearly complete. The servers will be installed in January, and if all goes according to plan, the new data center will go live next June. "We are looking at the hottest, biggest boxes we can put in," he says. "But keeping it cool won't be an issue."
Scottrade
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