Fully Managed Enterprise Virtualisation Solution reduces
IT costs by more than 25 per cent and decreases energy consumption
by more than 40 per cent
“Improved service scalability, availability and cost
reduction were the primary objectives in our reassessment
and change of approach as we were beginning to feel the
pinch operating a number of services on multiple hardware
platforms,”
Richard Swift,
General Manager,
Yieldbroker
Overview:
With a growing number of individual trades daily each
valued in millions of dollars, Yieldbroker’s financial markets
are not for the faint-hearted. Indeed, it is not for the
general public – it is Australia’s foremost wholesale fixed-income
trading platform for professional investors and market makers
who insist on reliability.
The dominant ASIC-licensed electronic fixed-income trading
system in the Australian market, Yieldbroker provides institutional
investors with price discovery and deal execution capabilities
in a secure online trading environment.
It operates the licensed financial markets in the form
of a multi-tier server-client application known as “Yieldbroker
DEBTS” for fund managers and market makers. Yeildbroker’s
customers include ABN, Citi, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Macquarie,
RBC, UBS among others.
Yieldbroker is essentially a business-to-business equivalent
of the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) for the local wholesale
fixed income market and, as such, it faces the same regulatory
and compliance requirements as the ASX in terms of technology
and security accreditations.
Security and redundancy are top priorities for this 100
percent online, transaction based business alongside 100
percent availability of its service for customers in the
current volatile financial market.
The Opportunity:
Yieldbroker had been operating a
complex
managed dedicated hosting solution that comfortably
met its security and service availability requirements but
was beginning to feel the strain as the business expanded
and a raft of new banks began accessing the platform.
Yieldbroker’s IT staff were traditionally responsible
for back-up, maintenance, patching and load balancing across
all IT infrastructure and now found they were also managing
sever expansions and IT procurement processes as new infrastructure
was deployed to cope with the growth.
Apart from the resource drain placed on the business,
Yieldbroker found that rising electricity costs and increased
scrutiny of online security approaches were pointing to
the need for a more robust and scalable approach to its
server management.
As Richard Swift, General Manager, Yieldbroker said,
“We are not in the hardware provision and maintenance industry
and need to isolate ourselves from that part of operating
our business so that our small team can focus on what’s
central in our objectives.”
“We chose to create a layer of abstraction between the
physical components of our system, which we naturally expect
to fail from time to time, and the operating systems we
expect to run reliably non-stop if the hardware allows it.”
“Improved service scalability, availability and cost
reduction were the primary objectives in our reassessment
and change of approach as we were beginning to feel the
pinch operating a number of services on multiple hardware
platforms,” Swift said.
Enterprise Virtualisation required to deliver Flexibility,
Scalability and Reliability:
Under the
dedicated managed server solution, Yieldbroker
had repeatedly invested in new hardware to support growth.
“We saw our traditional approach to infrastructure was
equivalent to constructing and demolishing office buildings
each time we increased or decreased customer numbers or
headcount” Swift said “the coupling was too tight.”
“Not only were we spending valuable time assessing and
deploying new servers and infrastructure, but with every
expansion we were losing confidence in the original security
and integrity of our initial infrastructure design.
“To return to the building analogy, we shouldn’t need
to worry about an office tower’s structural capacity when
moving an employee from a workstation cluster to a corner-office,
but we undertook the corresponding activities for IT infrastructure
regularly” Swift said.
The Solution:
Yeildbroker worked with Macquarie Hosting to switch its
complex dedicated managed hosting solution to an
enterprise virtualisation solution that would ensure
the flexibility required to support expansion of the business
without the need to invest in additional infrastructure.
Similarly, the virtualised approach offered the security
and scalability required to cope with rapid increases and
spikes in traffic to the platform at any time.
“With Macquarie Telecom we knew the highest levels of
security for our critical applications and customer information
was a given,” Swift said.
“They have a proven track record helping federal government
agencies meet their regulatory and security requirements
and the security certifications it has achieved – namely
DSD Gateway certification to the level of highly protected
and
ISO 27001 – mean we can turn to our regulator and say,
‘Our
ASIO T4 data centre provider is accredited to industry
best practice.”
“What we needed now though was the added flexibility
to rapidly expand our server capacity without jeopardising
our back-up or failover capabilities which remained top
priorities,” Swift said.
Macquarie Hosting designed and implemented a fully managed
high availability virtualised solution. The solution
utilised multiple high performance HP servers and Cisco
firewalls, as well as a dedicated EMC Clarion SAN for robust
data storage.
The solution leverages the Macquarie Hosting managed
load balancing service across enterprise virtual servers
as well as managed backup services to provide reliable on
demand tape backup and archiving. It also utilises the high
speed Macquarie Telecom Internet core network for high speed
multiple carrier redundant access to the Internet.
VMware ESX was used to provide the ability to scale both
Web and database servers on demand and provide greater redundancy
at both the server and hardware layer. Additional benefits
of the Enterprise Virtualisation are the ability to independently
optimise server CPU and memory resource to manage spikes
in demand and allow for a greater return on investment of
the dedicated infrastructure.
The solution is supported by a dedicated Storage Area
Network (SAN), redundant Local Area Network (LAN) and Managed
Firewall services.
Managed back-up and managed security services offer added
redundancy and every device in the solution is mirrored.
Such a configuration safeguards against disruption to trading
as a result of component failure, which protects Yieldbroker
from outages and the regulatory scrutiny that accompanies
them.
The managed enterprise virtualisation solution provides
a combination of both high-availability and resilience,
combined with real-time scalability and rapid deployment.
The Results:
The rollout has seen Macquarie Hosting deliver on its
promise of providing a secure, scalable and robust hosting
environment for Yieldbroker’s online trading platform and
critical applications.
Since rollout the company has experienced significant
improvements in redundancy and business continuity, as evidenced
by a critical server failure involving a disk controller
shortly after go-live of the virtualised environment.
“Even with redundant power supplies, disks, network interfaces
et al, a controller failure will usually down a server,”
Swift said.
“In the Macquarie Hosting environment though, the affected
virtual servers were simply moved to a functional physical
host and we were quickly back in business.
“Had the incident occurred a few months earlier, Yieldbroker
would have been at the mercy of the courier delivering the
spares.” Swift said.
Yieldbroker is now working with Macquarie Hosting to
ensure this kind of failover happens automatically, delivering
added redundancy.
Since moving to the managed virtualised hosting environment
Yieldbroker has reduced its sever hosting costs by more
than 25 per cent and decreased its energy consumption by
more than 40 per cent.
Mr Swift said of the partnership, “Macquarie Hosting
delivers certainty to Yieldbroker’s technical operation
and allows us to focus on our business at a high level without
being distracted by day-to-day management of underlying
infrastructure.
“Since go-live the platform has scaled effortlessly from
four to sixteen participating banks. We have, in the same
timeframe, significantly reduced our operating costs, our
environmental footprint, and our exposure to systematic
risk factors by eliminating many potential failure points.”
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