About A top three global brokerage firm

The firm, known for its robust online and mobile trading platforms and commission-free trades, offers full-service investment management, online trading and banking services to clients around the world with total client assets north of $3.5 trillion. They experienced 10% annual growth and recently acquired a competitor.

Challenge

Overcome system outages, data loss, scalability, and latency issues

The company needed to modernize their infrastructure to scale without barriers, provide a superior customer experience, and continue to introduce new, engaging mobile applications. Accomplishing this would mean an increase in revenue through more focused risk management and better portfolio monitoring.

However, the firm’s traditional infrastructure — an RDBMS and RAM-based cache — was unable to deliver sufficient performance, scalability, and flexibility to keep up with demand or properly support the compliant system of record for customer accounts — a DB2 mainframe database.

Top problems:

  • Frequent latency issues and system outages on high-volume trading days or with new applications

  • Data loss (due to reliance on RAM, which is not persistent) and time-intensive complete system restarts

  • Expensive, inconsistent nightly batch processing from the intraday system to the master DB2 (book of record) was expensive and cumbersome

  • Re-architecture the data layer

    Front their DB2 system of record and mainframe database to remain highly available for its read, write, and new applications

  • Ensure ultra-low latency

    Deliver exceptional service to more than 10 million customers

  • Provide real-time updates

    Update stock prices and show balances on 300 million positions in real time

  • Keep up with 1000% data growth

    Address expectations cost-effectively for 1,000% data growth during its mobile strategy execution

Solution

A better customer experience and increased revenue via Aerospike’s hybrid architecture

The company’s IT department explored a number of options and quickly realized that Aerospike was the only solution that could provide the required performance due to its Hybrid Memory Architecture (HMA). Instead of using expensive yet unreliable RAM, the firm appreciated how Aerospike’s use of solid state drive (SSD) flash technology reduced cost, increased reliability, decreased the server footprint, and provided immediate data persistence.

  • Making real-time customer portfolio data available to drive margin loans

    Set up Aerospike clusters and built an Aerospike integration layer, which talks to the systems of record whenever the legacy applications are writing to the database.

  • Implementing a new intraday operational data store

    Aerospike layers get data at the beginning of the day, the site application reads and writes the data into Aerospike within the same transaction and then posts a message into the messaging queue.

  • Empowering new capabilities by providing easy access to vast amounts of data

    With Aerospike as the system of record, there is real-time access to all data, making it easier to scale and manage and giving the firm the opportunity to leverage backup and recovery capabilities.

  • Increasing flexibility and reducing change management risks

    With Aerospike as an active-active system distributed across multiple zones, operations such as new zone setup, failover, traffic handling, updates, and cloud deployment are all made easier and less error-prone.

Results

Achieving strategic business growth goals via Aerospike as its “secret sauce”

Even with the increased load during the COVID-19 crisis, the brokerage firm has been able to exceed customer expectations; there has been no disruption in Aerospike’s stability, latency, or performance. Aerospike is referred to as the “secret sauce” when it comes to low latency for the organization and is used as the operational system of record for all new application capabilities.

The firm uses Aerospike as an active-active system distributed across multiple zones, which provides huge flexibility benefits and reduces risk during change management. New zone setup, failover, traffic handling, updates, and cloud deployment are all made easier and less error-prone with Aerospike’s ability to isolate the changes in one zone from another zone.

  • 13 billion queries per day

    Extreme performance for over 13 billion queries and 250M transactions per day with 99.9% requests returned in sub-milliseconds.

  • TCO reduced by 90%

    Went from 150 RAM cache servers to a 10-server Aerospike cluster, while simultaneously improving performance and resulting in 90% TCO reduction

  • Savings of $10K per day

    Migrated end-of-day batch system to real-time, customer facing solution significantly improving customer satisfaction while saving $10,000 per day with mainframe offloading

  • 400% faster throughput

    Improved performance at scale with 400% faster throughput with 300% larger object store
Aerospike is the backbone of our scaling infrastructure. We can scale it easily by adding nodes. [During the coronavirus pandemic], the market went very volatile, our systems were very stable, and we never had an issue with latency or performance during this time. This is a big validation of all the efforts we put into modernization.

Vice President, Technology, Top 3 Global Brokerage Firm

We are happy to say that since we went live with our core post processing engine, it’s working perfectly. We’ve never had any issues where a customer complained about something not being processed correctly on the back-end system. It's a true reflection of [Aerospike’s] capabilities…and how we are able to leverage those [capabilities] in the application layers.

Vice President, Technology, Top 3 Global Brokerage Firm

We’re able to develop an industry-leading performance reporting capability with Aerospike as our system of record. None of our competitors have this in-house because of the complexity involved.

Vice President, Technology, Top 3 Global Brokerage Firm