Barclays and Sun Life Financial have been acclaimed by the Uptime Institute for pioneering work in creating energy efficient data centers.

Barclays rooted out so much obsolete equipment that it has created a US$6m saving on maintenance and electricity consumption.

The Uptime Institute’s third Annual Server Roundup, an initiative to encourage data centers to save power, rated companies on their efforts to increase efficiency. 

Barclays removed 9,124 physical servers in 2013, which lowered the power consumption of its data center by an estimated 2.5MW of power which, according to Barclays director Paul Nally, cut the electricity bill by $4.5m.

Installed together, these servers would have filled 588 server racks.

In addition, 20,000 network ports and 3,000 storage area network ports were freed up by this initiative.

Barclays estimated that has saved $1.3m on legacy hardware maintenance costs.

The savings come from internal virtual private cloud technologies said Ian Penny, global head of distributed technologies at Barclays.

Over the past two years, Barclays has removed nearly 15,000 servers.

“As we deploy our next generation cloud platforms and start to leverage hybrid resource models, we expect this trend to continue,” Penny said.

Second placed Sun Life Financial retired 441 servers from its data center in 2013, replacing 54 of those with newer, more efficient models, while converting 75 to virtual servers.

Sun Life’s server roundup is expected to save 115kW of power, cutting the power bill by Can$100,000.

Recycling the servers has created more space in its data center, said Rocco Alonzi, assistant VP of data center governance at Sun Life Financial.

The yearly competition has helped create a momentum, he said.

“A process that’s sustainable and easily repeatable aligns with our overall data center program,” Alonzi said.

“Comatose servers are like rampant insidious weeds in a garden and abatement is an ongoing responsibility,” said Matt Stansberry, the Uptime Institute’s director of content and publications.

The Uptime Institute will host its Server Roundup Awards Showcase at Uptime Institute Symposium in California from May 20 to 22.