Wall Street & Technology takes a look at some cloud computing development initiatives at big Wall Street firms, including Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and others. One example is AQR Capital Management, where an initiative to seed a cloud has been underway for several months. 

"The backbone is a privately managed dark fiber network that connects AQR's two data centers with each other and with the firm's Greenwich, Conn. headquarters, and four core Cisco networks that enable 400 servers in the three locations to act as one virtual facility operating at 10 gigabits per second." The goals are better disaster recovery and efficiency in general. One executive tells the magazine: "Quantitative staff might need to test and model an idea and suddenly need a few servers and storage--in the old days it would take quite a bit of time to get the equipment."

What's interesting to me is that this sort of work is still going on at a time of extreme upheaval, in the case of Merrill Lynch and Citigroup anyway. You can sense the cultural discomfort giving way. At some point, however, someone is going to have to do some sort of ROI analysis, which seems scant still. 

For more:
- here's the article [1]

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