Server virtualization and SAN for high availability trading at SIHL |
 |
By Dhwani Pandya, Principal Correspondent
06 Jan 2010 | www.SearchDataCenter.in |
|
|
Broking firm Shah Investors Home Ltd (SIHL) wanted to establish a high-availability
environment for its Open Dealer Integrated Network (ODIN) trading and
risk management platform. High availability of ODIN is absolutely
critical, as it executes 30,000 to 40,000 trades daily on behalf of the
company's clients through a computer-to-computer link with Indian stock
exchanges, as Jinal Shah, the IT manager at Shah Investors, points out.
Shah Investors wanted to deal with three basic issues: production
server availability, resource sharing capacity for optimum use of
physical resources, and planned downtime. While evaluating various
solutions, Shah realized that server virtualization would address these
three basic requirements. In December 2008, Shah Investors decided to
engage Avnet Technology Solutions India as the implementation partner.
At this point, the company considered three leading vendors for server
virtualization, VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. Shah did not find
proper representation from Citrix and Microsoft. "As we were planning
to put business critical applications in a virtualized environment, I
wanted a complete proof of concept," says Shah. "Only VMware's channel
partners were able to give us a live demo of our applications. Hence we
decided to go with their solution."
Avnet Technology Solutions helped design and deploy VMware
Infrastructure for Shah Investors' most business applications. While
considering server virtualization, Shah Investors also realized a need
for robust storage backend, and hence decided to design fiber channel
based
SAN storage. Explaining the need behind SAN storage, Shah says: "In
case of server virtualization, it is advisable to have storage at a
centralized location. Also, in the high availability environment, it
will be very difficult to transfer data from one server hard disk to
another in case of server failure."
Earlier, Shah Investors used ten HP servers to run ODIN and exchange
application, as well as its SQL database. Now, it runs 10 virtual
machines hosted on three Dell blade servers. These servers, along with
a backup machine, are supported by EMC's SAN storage with fiber channel
connectivity (CLARiiON AX4-5 storage system) with 2.1 TB capacity. Says
Shah: "The servers are designed in a failover cluster fashion so that
if one of the three Dell servers is down, the application can be easily
moved to the next available sever."
Shah Investors had to invest Rs 15 to 20 lakh in the server
virtualization solution, while SAN storage took almost Rs 6 lakh of
investment. The company plans to leverage this investment over period
of three to four years.
|
|
|
|
|
SIHL has been able to increase average CPU utilization from the current level of 25-40 percent to 60 percent while achieving a server consolidation ratio of 3:1.
Jinal Shah
IT Manager, Shah Investors
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Improved performance
Shah Investor's Home Ltd has been able to optimize its existing
servers by increasing average CPU utilization from the current level of
25-40 percent to 60 percent while achieving a server consolidation
ratio of 3:1. The combination of virtualization running on servers with
multi-core processors has improved performance by 30-40 percent. It has
also helped the company switch memory and CPU capacity to support
database processing once a trading day is over, while reducing power
and cooling costs by 20 percent.
According to Shah, the backup process has become extremely lucid
now, as they just need to take snapshot of each server. The earlier
manual backup process which required three administrative people is now
handled by single software. The backup window has also been reduced to
three hours (from five hours).
|
|
|
|
