Global Investment Bank Saves Millions with RainStor

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1 SUCCESS STORY Global Investment Bank Saves Millions with RainStor Reduces data footprint by 97%, meets stringent compliance regulations and achieves payback in 18 months

2 Background Financial Services Institutions (FSIs) including large investment banks continue to struggle with massive data volumes, which are now doubling in size with each passing year. They must also deal with increased regulatory scrutiny from their own industry with groups like FINRA, and from their governments in the form of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Dodd Frank Reform, SEC and FDIC regulations. These and other regulatory bodies have mandated strict reporting and data retention requirements. Data retention is only part of the challenge financial institutions must ensure the historical data is available online and fully accessible for look-ups, audits and reports in a timely manner, with penalties assessed for delayed responses. Analysts within the financial services industry estimate that approximately 40% of IT budgets and the corresponding resources at each Bank are consumed by compliance related activities. The sheer volume of regulatory changes continues to challenge the industry s ability to respond in a timely manner and more importantly the business is consumed with cost-effective compliance goals rather than focusing on business and IT innovation. FINRA OATS regulation impacts all brokerage firms that enter equity security orders to the marketplace. All order event types must be captured and include accurate timestamps, account type, destination and other detail. This large volume of information is transmitted as an audit trail to FINRA at the conclusion of each business day. EBS (Electronic Blue Sheet) regulation impacts all brokerage firms that trade in securities listed by ISG selfregulatory organizations. All execution, average price, and allocation events must be captured with appropriate detail. When requested by an ISG member, firms must query their databases and transmit EBS files. Failure to properly fill out blue sheet fields and respond within the stipulated time is a violation of FINRA Rule 8211 and/or FINRA Rule Therefore, efficient data storage of exponentially growing financial data is one of the biggest challenges today. Highlights : Expected $5M in total cost savings over 4 years 90% ROI forecast in four years Break even in 18 months 6x reduction in processing time for compliance needs 3x faster query performance RainStor 2

3 We were pressing the panic buttons! Data growth was causing unsustainable storage growth. Chief Architect, Global Investment Bank About the Organization With nearly 50,000 employees in over 500 offices in 50 countries, this Global Investment Bank is one of the largest in the world. It provides companies, institutional clients and private clients worldwide with advisory services, comprehensive private banking & wealth management, and investment banking services. At the current data growth rate the volume of data at the firm is expected to reach 75 petabytes by the end of The firm was faced with challenges related to the storage and management of trading data in a much more cost effective and easily accessible manner in order to meet the ongoing regulatory demands. Challenges The challenges faced can be broadly classified under 3 categories: Therefore, cutting down the growing storage hardware costs and avoiding inefficient offline tape was imperative given the Bank s tight IT budgets YoY. Complexity of data and trading applications The Bank s trading data was stored in multiple instances of a data warehouse environment, which were located in different data centers around the world. The Bank needed a solution that could not only load data efficiently from disparate trading application sources but also make the data available for query at any given time. Ensure complete compliance of financial regulations The Bank must satisfy a whole host of regulatory requirements. Among these was a requirement that multiple years of data to be available on-demand. Strict SLAs around response and system up time had to be met even with fast data growth. i) Cost, ii) Complexity and iii) Compliance Risk Cost effective archiving and management of data Historically the Bank experienced geometric doubling of data volumes that stood at 1 billion daily records in 2012, to be retained indefinitely for regulatory reasons. Previously, the Bank was keeping one month of data online and stored on expensive Tier-1 SAN hardware. Data older than one month was archived to Tier 3 storage. Neither option was sustainable given the current data volumes and data growth rates. Third option of storing data on offline tape would be labour intensive, time consuming and costly to retrieve. RainStor 3

4 The RainStor Solution Data Management Strategy Responding to the challenge of providing a scalable, secure and highly available database that would not only satisfy data-related compliance and query requirements but also meet current and future capacity requirements at significantly lower costs, the Bank chose RainStor. The RainStor database was deployed as the online data archive solution replacing the existing data warehouse running on Sybase IQ for trade historical data. RainStor was setup to retain all of the Bank s historical trade data. To initiate RainStor as the dedicated online archive solution, 13 years of historical data was loaded into RainStor from the existing Sybase IQ environment and then a daily feed was set-up from the trading application database in to RainStor for ongoing business and regulatory reports and analysis. All data was moved as-is from Sybase IQ to RainStor without any schema change or a single line of code required. With this configuration, the Bank could query and analyze all its historical data within RainStor. Deploying RainStor RainStor was deployed quickly because: RainStor is open and standards based and therefore quickly integrates with existing data warehouse infrastructure RainStor loads data 3X faster than existing infrastructure based on Sybase IQ RainStor supports enterprise-grade security solutions including High-availability, Authentication, Authorization, LDAP integration and Active Directory RainStor 4

5 Economic and Business Benefits Size: 97% Storage Footprint Reduction Translates to Millions in Cost Savings The Bank achieved major economic and business operational benefits from the implementation of RainStor as the dedicated online data archive for historical trades. Significantly reduced hardware storage footprint»» Reduced the Bank s storage footprint for historical trading data by 30x - a 97% hardware cost reduction (See figure 1).»» Optimizes the company s capital investment as well as reduces power costs and space requirements across their global data centers.»» Faster query performance and simplified database administration, which translates to reduced administration man-hours. Figure 1: Reduction in Storage Footprint RainStor 5

6 Speed: Faster Data Load and Analysis After deploying RainStor on VMs/NAS storage to store and manage 13 years of trade history, the nightly transfer of data from the application data warehouse was reduced from an overnight 8-12 hours to just 2 hours (see figure 2). Because of the faster data load, administrators now have up-to-date information at the beginning of the next working day in order to conduct regular daily reports and analysis. The improvement in data query performance on RainStor was up 3X due to both the reduced data footprint and RainStor s built-in dynamic filtering capabilities which speeds up query response rates. In addition, the data load no longer runs into the next working day, avoiding adverse impacts on end users leverage the environment for ongoing reports and lookups. Figure 2: Reduction in Load/Query time RainStor 6

7 RainStor doesn t care what hardware it runs on. Just as good on Tier-2 or Tier- 3 hardware. Lowest cost and you still gain more capacity! Chief Architect, Global Investment Bank Scale: Extremely Scalable Database Meets Future Growth The RainStor database is designed for predictive scalability handling data volumes of hundreds of terabytes to multipetabyte scale. With the Bank s data volumes predicted to double in size every year, reaching 75 petabytes by 2016, RainStor was the ideal solution. The Bank deployed RainStor on Tier 3, NAS storage providing a cost effective, highly scalable technology platform. Safety: Comprehensive built-in Safety Measures As the Bank centralizes its historical trade data on RainStor in a single location, this provides the ability to secure critical data more efficiently. RainStor s built-in LDAP and Active Directory integration combined with authentication, authorization and role-based access capabilities ensure that the Bank s data is tamper-proof and immutable. In addition, RainStor also provides data high-availability features that enable the Bank to adhere to strict SLAs. Simplicity: Efficiently Runs on Low-cost Commodity Hardware RainStor is simple to deploy and manage. It can be deployed on all types of commodity hardware infrastructures - SAN, NAS, CAS, or Cloud. The Bank was able to move data from legacy applications hosted on expensive hardware to RainStor giving them the ability to scale out as needed in the most cost-effective manner consistent with the needs of the business. In addition to the simplicity of deployment, RainStor requires negligible database administration. No additional IT resources were required for ongoing management of RainStor. Calculation of Reduced Cost Savings The Bank commissioned an independent study that did a direct comparison of storage cost savings realized by deploying RainStor on commodity Tier-3 NAS hardware as opposed to Sybase IQ deployed on a combination of Tier-1 SAN and Tier-3 NAS. The results were dramatic (See Figure 3). RainStor 7

8 It s like shrinkwrapping your data forever! VP, Technology Global Investment Bank Figure 3: Annual cost comparison Total cost savings on storage hardware using RainStor was $5.7 million. Benefits Summary The Bank s investment in RainStor is expected to generate total financial and operational benefits of over $5.8 million dollars over four years. The largest portion of the benefits will come through 97% reduction in hardware storage and power costs. The other soft benefits include faster load, improved query response, improved security, lower labor costs and flexibility of deployment. With plans to break even on its investment within 18 months, the project is on track to achieve 90% ROI over a four-year period on CAPEX alone. The Bank found the results nothing short of phenomenal. RainStor 8

9 About RainStor RainStor is the only enterprise database that consistently delivers 90% cost savings to customers facing Big Data and Data Warehousing challenges. RainStor s patented technology provides the industry s highest rate of data compression combined with high performance on-demand query access, resulting in huge cost savings, improved operational efficiency and predictive scalability when managing and analyzing Big Data.RainStor s comprehensive built-in security ensures data privacy, protection against insider threats via role-based access, authorization and authentication. RainStor provides customers the flexibility to choose from a wide variety of storage options, including NAS, SAN, CAS, Cloud and even runs natively on Hadoop, further leveraging existing investment on low cost commodity hardware. Customers deploy RainStor to cut costs by 90%, reduce complexity and compliance risk while meeting business demands for operational efficiency and high performance analysis. RainStor sells directly and through strategic partners including Amdocs, Anritsu, Dell, HP, Teradata and others delivering enterprise-grade Big Data solutions. For more information, please visit or join the conversation at