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Green By Design

Many of the lessons learned over the past several years, will be leveraged in Wachovia's new headquarters, scheduled to open in Charlotte in the summer of 2009. The 48-story building is being built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) specifications, a set of standards developed by the U.S. Green Building Council for environmentally sustainable construction. To be LEED certified, a building is evaluated against a set of standards, including energy efficiency, water conservation, indoor air quality, renewable materials and use of local suppliers.

Wachovia plans to implement its processor array model to support the demanding applications delivered to its traders. Traders are typically power users—they use a lot of video, require streaming market data, and often have anywhere from four to eight monitors at their desks. "They're not our typical client base—they represent maybe only 10% of our organization," says Scott Haynes, senior platform and data center architect. "So, we're looking for something that's going to be very high performance."

Instead of having a high-end desktop computer, traders will instead connect to a processor array through a portal device on their desks. The device, being supplied by Teradici of Burnaby, B.C., is shaped somewhat like a hockey puck. Users gain access to the processing power of a blade server, but from an administrative standpoint it is much easier to manage than having individual workstations deployed on desks, says Haynes. In the event of a system failure, IT personnel will be able to switch a user to a "hot" spare blade server in a matter of minutes, greatly improving uptime.

In addition, traders are frequently moved between task groups on the trading floor to respond to market conditions. With typical workstation scenarios, such moves are time consuming and costly (estimated at about $1,000 per move). With the virtualized model, Haynes says traders can have their desktops switched to any location on the floor.

For the remainder of the bank's non-trading employees Wachovia is also looking to deploy thin clients, but with less processing power dedicated to each client on the backend. "That's going to give us the ability to take the processor array model and really make it shine," says Haynes, "because we can now move people around, and at night we can take all of the excess computing power and put it into our grid for computational stuff.

"It's really about flexible computing. We're really tired of having all these high energy desktops at people's desks that are used for only seven hours a day," he says. Pilots are currently taking place to see how well the system can scale. Wachovia hopes to learn, for example, how many thin clients it can plug into a processor array before performance deteriorates, and to determine which users are best suited for the technology.

"We're basically going to see how deep we can stack these guys before they say, 'you know what - give me a desktop'," says Haynes.

And as the new systems are deployed and virtual technology implemented, the team is keeping chief technology officer Mark Cate's message of replace two things with one in mind. That has translated into implementing a wide range Web services, applications providing a function such as looking up a credit report, that can be accessed by multiple applications. In one instance, Hall took a look a five new project requests and saw that each required a reporting tool. Rather than purchase five new tools, he was able to create a Web service to support all five projects. "We've done the same in such areas as messaging, document conversion, and Web hosting," says Hall.

Haynes and Hall admit the last several years have been not been without bumps. In one instance the team attempted to create a "mega service," a central repository for a wide range of Web services that programmers could use to build applications in a Lego-block fashion. A wide variety of applications could tap into the mega service to run components of a program on an as-needed basis.

The mega service made sense in theory, but in practice didn't get a lot of use. "I think the problem is, developers like coding to what they think is the best design, and some of the things we did with the mega service, took that away," says Hall.

But for every idea that didn't work, there have been many others, like virtual I/O, that are moving forward.

"Thinking back, there are a lot of lessons we learned," says Hall. "We hired a lot of great people, tried a lot of interesting things and worked with some great vendors. And, really, the management team deserves credit for allowing this to happen."

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