Thriving on high transaction volume

Simply stated, the more customers a financial services enterprise can serve every second the better, because speed brings higher profits and an advantage over slower competitors. Therefore, leading banks, exchanges, brokerages, insurance companies, and other transaction centric organizations constantly seek technology that will enable them to process more transactions, from more customers, in less time.

To increase the performance of their information systems, IT professionals can employ a variety of strategies such as buying faster servers, increasing RAM, tuning databases, and adding monolithic RAID storage systems. But these strategies don’t always work or provide the most cost-effective way of boosting application performance. That’s why Fox River, Banco Azteca, COEfx, and many other leading financial service firms turned to solid state disks (SSD) – very high performance networked storage devices based on RAM or Flash memory that are used to speed up enterprise applications such as those based on Oracle, SQL Server, SAP, DB2, and other databases.

Fox River
Fox River Financial Resources electronically trades equities, options, and futures. It promises clients trade executions at a set price that is better than they can obtain themselves in the market. By executing at a price that beats the promise price, Fox River increases profit from the trade. As such, trading volume is high. Because technology and speed are at the core of its competitive advantage, Fox River is constantly looking to improve its ability to rapidly analyze data and execute trades.

“Technology is used as a weapon,” says James Moskalik, Director of Technology Services at Fox River Financial Resources. “We are pitting our brain and our technology against our competitors. In this business, you really do live and die by how good your technology is.”

After investigating many options, a Texas Memory Systems RamSan solid state disk quickly emerged as the preferred solution for Fox River. They judged that the RamSan would deliver the expected performance improvements and fit well into their infrastructure. In fact, a batch process went from over 3 hours to under 20 minutes when Fox River moved to the RamSan.

“The RamSan is a much simpler, streamlined, easy-to-deal-with system, as compared to large, traditional Fibre Channel arrays,” Moskalik explained. “Milliseconds make a difference here. And the RamSan is very cost effective in terms of performance to dollars spent. We are getting what we hoped for out of it and we’d definitely consider expanding in the future. It is a good investment.”

Banco Azteca
Banco Azteca is one of the largest banks in Mexico, with more than 1,500 branches throughout Latin America and over 5.2 million savings accounts. In addition to the full range of traditional banking services, Banco Azteca offers credit cards, personal loans, car loans, and mortgages. Director of Systems, Juan Arevalo Carranza, says that the bank began to consider high performance storage solutions because they were “willing to invest in order to have the most stable bank, with the best response times to meet the high level of demands from millions of clients.”

After analyzing a range of different alternatives, Banco Azteca turned to Texas Memory Systems for their superior experience with performance issues in the bank’s particular database environments, and because Texas Memory Systems was the only vendor offering a viable one terabyte solid state solution. The bank also liked the Texas Memory Systems RamSan SSD because it guaranteed continuous availability, data security, better database response times, and a much larger volume data transfer between storage and servers.

“We also thought about implementing new hard disks with less capacity and higher RPM,” says Carranza. “However, we are still talking about response times in milliseconds, when we really require nanoseconds.”

An initial one terabyte RamSan was deployed. “We have had excellent results, really spectacular!” Carranza notes. “So we have acquired our second Tera-RamSan in order to improve the performance of other applications that we think are going to generate an added value to the organization.”

The Texas Memory Systems SSD was so successful that Banco Azteca is planning to implement RamSans as a standard solution in all new developments.

COESfx
COESfx, Inc., offers an advanced trading and clearing platform for foreign exchange trading and direct access to foreign exchange markets. COESfx’s hard disk-based RAID storage was unable to keep up with the I/O-intensive trading engine powered by SQL Server. Feeds from six different financial institutions were being held up by conventional storage, slowing down the entire application.

COESfx contacted TMS to eliminate their I/O bottleneck and accelerate the application to its fullest extent. A RamSan was selected by COESfx for its combination of performance and reliability features. Fred Hentschel, application administrator, believed they needed the best performance, so a solid state disk was the only choice.

After installing the RamSan, COESfx’s trading engine saw a 40% increase in I/O activity. “Storage, simply, is no longer our bottleneck,” notes Hentschel. “Setup was extremely simple and fast. We had the unit plugged in and configured in just a few minutes, and the management features make continued administration all but effortless.”

With such a positive experience, COESfx is now realigning its long term IT and competitive strategy to include solid state disks. They plan to leverage their RamSan units as a competitive advantage and “selling point” in the market.

“When a single appliance increases your core business 40%, the executives quickly take notice.”

In the past, storage went slow
Until recently enterprises such as financial services companies have stored their valuable data by recording it onto and then reading it from hundreds and sometimes thousands of hard disk drives (HDD). Over the years, computer processors and most other information system components have increased in speed and efficiency by orders of magnitude. But hard disk drives have not kept pace. This difference has created a substantial performance gap between how fast processors demand data and how quickly HDD can respond.

Storage speeds lag behind processors because HDD is constrained by physical considerations. A magnetic, spinning disk must be written to or read from by a physical arm traveling across the disk. Precious milliseconds go by as one part starts to spin up, then another moves to the appropriate area. The fastest HDD has access times equal to 5 milliseconds. Multiply this by the billions of operations demanded by financial services customers daily and a considerable lag results.

To combat HDD latency, expensive HDD arrays with large battery backed caches are often deployed for mission-critical revenue generating applications. Cached systems have complex architectures and offer a variety of advanced features to help manage point in time copies, data movement, data protection levels, and data sharing between competing applications. All of these features come with a latency price, because data bits must traverse complex circuitry during every Input/Output (IO) operation. This can add anywhere from 200 microseconds to 1 millisecond of latency to every IO operation. And when the business bottom line depends on the storage latency, every microsecond counts.

Now solid state makes storage fast
Solid state disks solve the problem of physical constraints by replacing hard disk drives with high speed circuitry. Texas Memory Systems designs and builds enterprise-level SSD systems, such as the RamSan product line, that store data on DDR RAM and/or NAND Flash memory. The RAM-based RamSan-400, the world’s fastest storage device [1] according to tests submitted to the vendor-neutral Storage Performance Council (SPC), has a 15 microsecond access time (250 times faster than HDD).

Replacing HDD-based storage with solid state storage such as the RamSan offers significant benefits to financial services enterprises:

Improved Server Efficiency
When slow, conventional storage holds back the potential of expensive processors and servers, efficiency is reduced and money is wasted. Conversely, introducing fast RamSan SSD fully utilizes those servers, resulting in maximized ROI. If data only travels as fast as the slowest point in the network, then removing that bottleneck results in efficiency gains throughout the system.

Fewer Servers
The drive towards server consolidation means squeezing every drop of performance out of the remaining servers. When a RamSan can improve server efficiency, then that efficiency increase can lead to server consolidation without performance loss. This is especially true in "server-bloated" environments. Consolidating servers and moving the hottest data to SSD reduces storage TCO across the enterprise.

More Concurrent Users
When SSD is deployed, it typically takes the pressure off the much slower HDD systems it augments or replaces. This approach frees up those resources for other applications and tasks. In the case of query-based applications, adding RamSan SSD can increase the number of concurrent users receiving their data at higher speeds. Conventional thinking suggests that adding concurrent users requires more servers. But in fact, adding SSD scales concurrent users by improving server efficiency.

Faster Response Times
Without mechanical storage devices to slow down performance, users and applications get data at the speeds they demand. At the core of any enterprise is a critical database. Whether employees, customers, or other servers query it, anyone can benefit from faster response times.

Increased Customer Satisfaction
In many environments, particularly online transaction processing (OLTP), increased customer satisfaction is the first priority. Eliminating I/O bottlenecks with RamSan SSD can improve the performance of all hardware depending on that data. Whether the application is e-commerce, OLTP, hot files storage, or any other use, higher performance, faster response, and greater transactions mean increased user satisfaction.

Higher Profits
The financial industry knows the value of increased transactions per second. In this market, every additional transaction that the hardware can carry-out directly affects the bottom line. In such a situation, it is easy to see how SSD quickly pays for itself.

Bottom line
Solid state storage is a cost-effective way to improve application performance because SSD supports extremely high transaction loads without adding latency. Financial services companies that have implemented SSD are able to make better use of their server infrastructure, support increasing concurrent user loads with low response times, improve customer satisfaction, and most importantly grow their business.

Texas memory systems
Since 1978, Texas Memory Systems has specialized in high bandwidth, low latency enterprise data storage and digital signal processing systems. While the primary feature of our products has always been high performance, Texas Memory Systems achieves this performance without resorting to overly complex circuitry or unwieldy protocols. This emphasis on simplicity allows Texas Memory Systems to deliver outstanding performance using mature technologies and readily available off-the-shelf components.

Texas Memory Systems’ products were originally designed to meet the needs of the US defense industry, a primary customer throughout our history. This market has always demanded the ultimate in performance and we have always delivered it. Texas Memory Systems now brings our expertise to the commercial SAN market. The RamSan, Texas Memory Systems’ tenth generation SSD, delivers a level of performance previously unavailable in a commercial storage product.

Contact Info:
Texas Memory Systems
www.TexMemSys.com
Telephone: 1-713-266-3200

Reference:
[1] Details of the Texas Memory Systems RamSan-400 SPC-1 Results as of January 28, 2007 are available at:
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_all#a00063
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00063