back to article IT helps Australian bank achieve carbon-neutrality

National Australia Bank (NAB), one of Australia's big four banks, has detailed how changes to its data centres helped the organisation to become carbon neutral in a white paper (PDF) issued by the Open Data Center Alliance. The bank says it has been carbon neutral since 2010, thanks in large part to work on its data centres, …

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  1. MondoMan
    Thumb Down

    The white paper provides essentially no details, nor even any information on how the "carbon neutrality" was achieved (offsets? emissions rights?). It does, however, seem quite proud of setting double-sided printing as the default on all the company's printers!

    Given that, this article seems mostly content-free; perhaps not writing another such would save a few grams of carbon?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Carbon neutrality?

      Until someone farts in the office and upsets the equilibrium.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cost cutting and security measures now qualify as carbon abatements?

    Are there tax breaks for "carbon abatements" in play or something?

    Next thing you know, they'll be spinning layoffs as HR-related carbon abatement tricks.

    1. P. Lee

      Re: Cost cutting and security measures now qualify as carbon abatements?

      > Are there tax breaks for "carbon abatements" in play or something?

      Pretty much. The Oz govt is taxing carbon emissions but each company can trade its emissions allowance if it doesn't use them.

    2. Euripides Pants

      Re: HR-related carbon abatement tricks

      Nah, layoffs aren't carbon abatement. Killing the employees is carbon abatement.

  3. Magani
    Flame

    Pass the buck... er carbon

    “it is now up to IBM to try and be as efficient as they can... and thus reduce their operating cost and carbon footprint.”

    Is it just me, or does this really translate as, "We look greener now that we've palmed our carbon footprint problem off to IBM."

    1. The Aussie Paradox
      Paris Hilton

      Re: Pass the buck... er carbon

      Is it just me, or does this really translate as, "We look greener now that we've palmed our carbon footprint problem off to IBM."

      It will mean that the datacentres are sent offshore. Thus the Carbon generation is not happening on Australian soil and will not appear in the Carbon ledger.

      If we Carbon Tax all companies out of the country then we will have fresh air (because the carbon from other countries will not blow across our beloved land) and no jobs. Bye, bye mining companies (Already starting to happen in my area).

      Paris Hilton because she is Carbon neutral. (But Silicon positive?)

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Holmes

    That's what I really look for in a bank.

    Not a high Tier 1 Capital Ratio, or a bank which allows its branches autonomy so my bank manager really is a manager and can make real decisions, or a bank that doesn't try to flog me a credit card every 3 months, but a 'carbon neutral' bank.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What a load of crap

    You can't be "carbon-neutral" when :

    "NAB’s tri-generation facility is an on-site, natural gas-driven generator that supplies one of NAB’s existing strategic data centers with over 60% of its total energy requirements."

    Its bollox, as are most of the lunatic carbon trading/offsetting ponzi schemes.

    My favourite lunacy is wood-fired stoves, which eco-loons seem to like. Lets burn wood and someone will grow precisely the amount we burned so we're "carbon neutral".

    Lets not bother about the other pollutants which occur when you burn wood shall we - oh and we'll assume that the people selling us the (cheapest) wood are actually growing/transporting wood in some mythical "sustainable" manner.

    Total bollox as is most of the "carbon-neutral" stuff - eg wind turbines that create more carbon when built (just on concrete bases/access roads/infrastructure) than they'll ever save in their operating lifespan.

    Sorry for rant, I live in the UK where we pay lunatic subsidies for windfarms/RoCs/nonsense.

  6. dorisbloggs
    Happy

    Yeah Right

    Handing the problem to IBM, will it make it better, yeah right, having worked with them, they often lack skills, knowledge and some of their off shore people, may have the skills on paper, but lack an understanding of the culture/environment of the client. The only reason in a lot of cases they are the incumbent is historical, Banks run big mainframes - IBM :)http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/happy_32.png

    The data centre drive is all about cost, more than anything else, plus having moved in the case of NAB to Oracle, they have a large number of servers, that need to be virtualised / managed. Less footprint less cost. But they still run the mainframes, even though they are transitioning to internal cloud systems. I am not sure if the mid range cloud is going to be better or cheaper than running on ZOS Mainframes - which could help the power / heat and size issues.

    Having said that it is not about coming to work to do a bad job by the partners, but a lot of this is self justification for the outsourcing and partner selection. BTW Data centers for banking must be onshore for processing - APRA Rules, plus it is a tricky question to move decades of organically grown systems. In many cases there is no documentation, and the knowledge has retired - some systems are still in 360 Assembler ( IBM Mainframe Assembler), that are critical to banks.

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