Large International Investment Bank - Customer Case Study

With significant research functions based across several continents, this investment banking arm of a large international bank needed a solution that could feed massive amounts of data in parallel to a server farm consisting of hundreds of program trading clients. The senior leadership of the strategic technology team had already recognized parallelism as the right approach. They discarded their previous generation platform of multiple NAS filers and implemented a parallel file system from a major server vendor, running on top of that vendor’s high-end storage. The problem with this approach was that: it quickly ran out of steam and in less than a year was operating at about one-third the desired performance, unable to accommodate data and client growth. No amount of upgrades or optimization would overcome this delta in performance requirements, so the leadership team started benchmarking alternatives. The clear winner was the GRIDScaler™ appliance, which embeds an enterprise parallel file system and NAS inside DDN’s SFA storage engines for a compact, easy-to-deploy and manage parallel file system. In testing, and then in production, GRIDScaler delivered a level of performance that reduced the time to completion on key analytics metrics by over 80 percent. The bank also liked that DDN an enterprise parallel file system and NAS while WOS® (object storage solution) made the delivery of secure, private cloud data sharing among its multiple international sites simple and easy.