US-based Global Hedge Fund - Customer Case Study

This US-based Global Hedge Fund needed to catch multiple GB of data every trading day from multiple exchanges and support close to 50 quantitative analysts using hundreds of servers to create and test equity trading strategies. IT management was under pressure to solve the increasingly crippling bottleneck in market data processing and quantitative research results cause by the back-end storage infrastructure. Their traditional NAS filers, which were up to date and from a top enterprise vendors, were falling behind in market data capture – an alarming situation since the firm intended to add exchange and social data sources. Model backtesting speed was also hampered by data access performance on the filers slowing the productivity of the quantitative research team. Any attempt to improve performance by adding more filers resulted in more systems to manage and isolated data silos so that copying data for multi team use was consuming a considerable percentage of network and storage resources. After evaluating alternatives the Hedge Fund purchased a DDN EXAScaler® Parallel File System Appliance based on the Lustre file system. The 600TB appliance delivers up to 30GB/s through the parallel file system to support market data ingest requirements for today and tomorrow. The multi-GB performance to each client speeds analytics work, and the ability to run all processes against a centralized resource means no more data silos. With all market data consolidated on one platform that is 6x the speed of their previous infrastructure, the fund is testing 3 times the number of strategies in the same amount of time on an infrastructure which has a lower overall cost of ownership.