Citigroup announced Wednesday that it would be cutting 17,000 jobs as part of a broader restructuring designed to save the company $10 billion. The huge bank is likely to consolidate some of its data centers as part of this effort, according to Network World. This comes at a time when many large financial institutions are building new data centers. HSBC, for example, is building major new facilities in New Jersey and New York state as part of a broader data center construction program.
Citigroup has more than 50 data centers, which no doubt offers some opportunities to consolidate. An interesting wrinkle: Citigroup is in the middle of a major shift in its approach to high-performance computing, moving from clustered servers to a large-scale grid, according to a recent story at Wall Street & Technology. An excerpt:
So far, Citigroup has 11 projects "in flight" on the grid at various stages, from proofs of concept to being used 24/7, van Uden relates, noting that while today 2,000 cores operate on the grid, Citi hopes to have 7,000 CPUs running on it by the end of 2007. The grid has two main sites, located in Texas and London.
Read more at Wall Street & Technology, which also has an interesting piece on the financial industry's growing focus on high-performance computing and the infrastructure challenges that accompany it (link via Paul Kedrosky).
