Investment Bank - Change from UNIX to LINUX

Business Value Generated


Capital costs reduced 70 percent

Management costs reduced 50 percent

Performance increased by 2.8x

N+1 failover

Better IT responsiveness


Executive Summary

This global securities firm wanted to increase the throughput of its order-management
system. To leverage Linux, lower capital expenditures and simplify administration—without sacrificing the high availability of its existing solution—the bank turned to Egenera. The firm estimates that selecting the Egenera® BladeFrame® system reduced its capital costs by 70 percent and lowered management costs by 50 percent.

Business Challenge

This global securities firm wanted to increase the throughput of its order-management system. With several billion dollars in underlying securities moved each day, the bank needed an extremely reliable,high-performance system that would enable it to execute trades more quickly and help its portfolio managers secure better per-share prices for their customers. However, the needed upgrade would have
entailed significant capital costs based on the proprietary Unix platform then being used. The goal was to source a Linux system with the enterprise-class functionality needed to run a mission-critical application.

The application—a combination of middleware, C and C++ code, and a Java-based program-trading system—was running on several Sun E4800 machines networked to enable the hot clustering needed to balance the load. To guard against unplanned downtime, the trading system also used high availability software, which introduced a high degree of complexity in both setting up and managing the systems.

To leverage Linux, lower capital expenditures and simplify administration—without sacrificing the high availability of its existing solution—the firm turned to Egenera.

BladeFrame Solution
During a pilot phase, the team evaluated the BladeFrame in several areas:
Performance: The BladeFrame was tested against a Unix machine by running three of the bank’s internally developed applications on each system. A two-way Egenera Processing Blade™ module based on Intel® processors ran up to 2.8 times faster than a 4-way Unix box with its proprietary chips. It was also noted
that Egenera blades can be shipped with up to 32 GB of memory, higher than that of other vendors.

Virtualization: With Egenera PAN Manager™ software, resources can be easily reallocated as requirements dictate, enabling the bank’s IT personnel to right-size applications and better support business customers. Moreover, by eliminating per-server connections to networks and storage, virtualization has also lowered capital and operational costs.



Investment protection: With Unix systems, forklift upgrades are the
norm to move to next-generation processors. The BladeFrame enables the
bank to mix CPU sets within a single frame, protecting earlier investments.
Ultimately, Egenera replaced the firm’s legacy environment with the
BladeFrame platform, installing multiple systems in the U.S. and the U.K.
Using Egenera’s powerful virtualization software, the firm is now able to
dynamically reallocate resources as needed, reducing provisioning and
management time and creating a more stable environment during peak
trading hours. The firm estimates that selecting the Egenera system
reduced its capital costs by 70 percent and lowered management costs by
50 percent while delivering the performance and high availability required
for this mission-critical application.

Application portability: The bank found no difficulty porting its Java-based
applications from Unix to Linux, which had previously been a concern.
Networking: The team perceived that the BladeFrame’s internal highspeed,
low-latency network could be much faster than traditional networking
among discrete servers, enabling a faster response to market changes.
High availability: Traditionally, the bank backed up every production server
with a dedicated failover machine, at great cost and complexity. With
the Egenera system, a few blades are leveraged for backup across many
production blades, with no third-party software required.

Provisioning and maintenance: The ability to hot-plug additional
Processing Blades as needed notably decreased the time required to deploy
new servers. Moreover, unlike Unix systems, the BladeFrame can be maintained
without powering the system down.


Corporate Headquarters
Egenera, Inc.
165 Forest Street
Marlboro, MA 01752
U.S.A.
Phone: 508-858-2600
Fax: 508-481-3114
www.egenera.com

European Headquarters
Egenera Ltd.
Venture House
Arlington Square
Bracknell, Berkshire RG12 1WA
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 (0)1344 475237
Fax: +44 (0)8703 305946
www.egenera.com

Asia Pacific Headquarters
Egenera (Hong Kong) Limited
Suite 1903
Central Plaza
18 Harbour Road,
Wanchai, Hong Kong
Phone: 011 852-2877-9101
Fax: 011 852-2877-8611
www.egenera.com


http://www.egenera.com/pdf/casestudies/Case_Study_InvestBank4.pdf