Pocket Grids

Lehman Brothers, for example, plans to have a global compute grid by late 2007 and estimates that it will be slightly over 10,000 nodes. The firm intends to reach that scale by consolidating three separate compute grids it has for its New York interest rate derivatives, mortgage, and credit risk desks. Then the bank will connect the local London and Tokyo computing grids to the New York grid.

Such a large and useful capability begs to be managed centrally across the enterprise. Of course, grid computing isn't the only resource that is being centrally managed.

At Credit Suisse, CIO Tom Sanzone continues to build on what he had been doing at Citigroup's corporate and investment bank group. As part of Credit Suisse's "One Bank" strategy, Sanzone and his team continue to integrate what were, for all practical purposes, three separate IT organizations for Credit Suisse's investment bank, private bank and asset management businesses.

One of the first steps was to consolidate the commodity computing and other standard resources that were deployed in parallel across the bank into a new technology infrastructure systems group and offload the responsibility for the bank's enterprise-wide systems, such as human resources and financial applications, to a new corporate systems group.

This isn't to say that Credit Suisse is moving to a purely centrally managed IT organization—far from it. Sanzone is trying to create a proper balance between the individual business lines' needs and the bank's overall IT needs so that the IT organization can be as responsive as possible but also lower costs. He is the first to admit that it is a challenge to reach the proper balance between the two.

Combine the desire to tear down business silos and standardize hardware and software, and it feels as if the pendulum is swinging back toward the centrally managed resource model. Then comes Microsoft.

In June, Microsoft introduced its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which allows firms to run Windows Server 2003 in a high-performance computing model. Toss in some of the improvements that Microsoft has added to Excel 2007, such sever support, multi-threading capability, and increased workspace support—1 million rows by 16,000 columns—and firms find themselves with a pocket grid solution running on commodity hardware for around $15,000, and they don't have to share it with anyone else.

For those who prefer the centrally managed IT model, that is a rock-bottom price point. It is within every desk's budget to roll out this type of solution.

The IT worker tasked with setting up these solutions next to the trader's desks might be too young to remember the 1970s or 1980s, when centrally managed IT organizations were willing to make all the changes the desks requested for their systems, although it would take IT two years to accomplish those changes. However, you can bet the people running the desks and signing off on the budgets clearly recall those days.

Has Microsoft developed an enterprise grid killer? It's doubtful, but it has come up with an alternative solution to the Linux on commodity hardware solutions that have entrenched themselves in the industry. It also gives Microsoft a major foothold into high-performance computing. The fight between centralized and decentralized computing has just entered a new round.