National Australia is budgeting a saving A$22 million over the next seven years by consolidating its data centres. At the moment, it has 20 of them, but plans to get that number down to two.On Tuesday, the bank will open a new data centre, in Deer Park, Melbourne. As the new centre gets up to speed it will start to decommission other facilities.NAB's chief technology officer, Denis McGee, said the current inefficient data centre set-up accounted for 40 per cent of the bank's total energy consumption.When the project is completed, the bank's carbon emissions will be reduced by 3,200 tonnes a year (64 million black balloons).Saving money and reducing the bank's carbon footprint are only two of the goals for the data centre project. McGee said the bank was experiencing a rapid increase in the requirement for data storage. It needs modern systems that are flexible and scalable, and will allow the bank to handle demand with capacity that is sourced both inside and outside the organisation.The project will also help the bank reduce operational risk. "This is world's best practice," said Tim Palmer, senior manager of the data centre transformation project.The data centre has been built by Digital Realty, which NAB describes as the world's biggest provider of data centres.