Boston-based financial services firm State Street Corp. spends up to one-fourth of its operating budget on IT, and yet the price of hardware is outpacing its need for data center gear, reports Jon Brodkin at NetworkWorld. To remedy the situation, the firm is investing in more Linux hardware and open source software in its data centers, and it is implementing more automation and virtualization technologies.

The disconnect between the cost of high-end, proprietary servers and the demand for the hardware is a "recipe for disaster," according to State Street CIO Chris Perretta. Part of the solution is to set up an in-house provisioning system--or private cloud--that offers the flexibility of third-party cloud computing services.

The first State Street private cloud is being deployed at a backup site in Massachusetts, which is one of the firm's six primary data centers. The quasi cloud environment requires new tools for change control, provisioning, load balancing and more. Part of the site was separated out to house a huge number of commodity Linux servers, which will provide virtual desktops and cloud services.

For the private cloud, the company is transferring a number of workloads to the Linux gear and putting an emphasis on open source virtualization tools, but the project will not be entirely open source.

For more:
- see Jon Brodkin's article at NetworkWorld

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