The Challenge. ESG Case Study

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1 ESG Case Study Primatics Financial Delivers SaaS-based Solution Excellence Using EMC s XtremIO Date: March 2015 Authors: Mark Peters, Senior Analyst; Adam DeMattia, Market Research Analyst; and Monya Keane, Research Analyst Abstract: To enable new growth and mitigate common enterprise pain points tied to scalability and capacity requirements, Primatics Financial turned to EMC XtremIO s all-flash scale-out array to underpin and enhance its client-facing SaaS offering. The result has been a cost-neutral investment compared with traditional array expansion, which is delivering exceptional performance, reducing physical capacity needs, and removing stressors such as SLA compliance and solution administration. The Challenge According to recently conducted ESG research consisting of 25 in-depth interviews with senior IT decision makers, the challenges organizations most commonly face today with respect to their primary storage are tied to performance scalability and capacity growth. 1 This insight fits in closely with an opportunity that Primatics seized as a first-mover with Primatics Profile its delivery platform model just a few years ago. Primatics operates a SaaS platform named EVOLV that aims to automate risk and finance operations relating to a given financial institution s loan portfolio. As Primatics serves customers including half of the top 25 banks in the United States, it is not surprising that scaling performance and capacity over time would be a challenge. To better understand modern storage challenges, including how a transition to all-flash arrays helped alleviate these issues, ESG interviewed Kwang Sin, VP of Engineering at Primatics. Discussion topics ranged from the challenging issues Primatics faced, to why it chose to partner with XtremIO to address those issues, and the results of the partnership. Given the substantial data requirements for financial services firms and its accelerated client growth, Primatics found itself in a position in which data volume was growing at approximately a 200% annual rate. The growth was problematic because scaling the existing SAN infrastructure would be cost prohibitive. Sin said, Within six months of purchasing a new SAN with more than 50 terabytes of storage, we found ourselves at 80% capacity we were at a point where we either needed to buy another node, which was our original plan, or look at other alternatives. Beyond the immediate need to add the node, the long-term outlook for the approach wasn t rosy. Sticking with traditional infrastructure seemed less risky in the short term, but a cost-benefit analysis of alternative technologies such as all-flash arrays, which offer better long-term sustainability, pushed Sin in that direction. The decision Leading SaaS provider serving the financial sector. EVOLV SaaS platform delivers loan, risk, and credit solutions to financial institutions. 350 employees, $50-$100M annual revenue. 60+ clients including half of the top 25 banks in the U.S., representing more than $1 trillion in loans. Challenges Capacity growing quickly unable to scale cost effectively. Hitting IOPS bottlenecks. Solution Piloted one XtremIO X-Brick to ensure solution could meet needs. Deployed a two X-Brick XtremIO cluster in production. Running the Oracle backbone of EVOLV platform on XtremIO. Benefits Inline compression and dedupe alleviate capacity-growth issues. Increase in performance, ensuring no SLAs are violated. Delivering a higher-performing development environment. Numerous administrative and operational advantages over traditional storage. was, do we invest to expand our existing storage footprint, as this would be the least risky approach, or do we focus on exploring new storage options, which would provide us with not only much needed storage, but improved 1 Source: ESG Research Report, Next-generation Storage Architectures, March 2015.

2 ESG Case Study: Primatics Financial Delivers SaaS-based Solution Excellence Using EMC s XtremIO 2 performance for our potential clients in the months ahead, and deduplication capabilities? Applying a more long term strategic view, XtremIO was the clear solution, Sin said. One benefit of a SaaS-based application is that provisioning performance at peak times is the service provider s responsibility. This is an appealing benefit for Primatics customers, but for Primatics the SaaS provider it was challenging to provide a consistent level of performance during peak hours. What we were seeing with our traditional array was that we were hitting Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) limitations at peak usage for some of the core components of our software. The negative result was high disk latency and a direct impact to performance that would become noticeable to our customers. After in-depth analysis of the entire technology stack, ranging from application architecture, software components, virtualization, networking, servers and physical storage, enhancing storage was identified as the most cost effective and least disruptive option, Sin said. The Risks The Primatics Engineering organization was in an interesting situation. Its infrastructure decisions directly affect customers key business operations. Significant financial implications could arise if Primatics were unable to meet clients SLAs. When one of our largest customers aimed to reduce its month end processing time by nearly 85% it meant that our delivery on that goal would increase our revenue substantially, subject to a rigid SLA that would result in us forfeiting any such revenue increases if we missed the SLA. My business case for acquiring XtremIO was based on our ability to consistently exceed the SLA. Since moving to XtremIO, we have not encountered any lost revenue and consistently beat the SLA by several hours. This major client represented a large bulk of our business, and I didn t want to bet that client's satisfaction on anything other than an educated and quantified decision, which meant XtremIO was the right decision for us, Sin said. It s incredibly satisfying to be able to go to our current and prospective clients, which include some of the largest financial institutions in the nation, and have complete confidence that we can tackle any challenge they send our way. Kwang Sin VP Engineering Primatics Financial Primatics strategic solution was to meet demanding performance needs at a smaller operational cost than the financial institutions could achieve themselves. For a client to get the level of performance delivered by Primatics from internal data center infrastructure, the capital expense required would be orders of magnitude higher. Still more money would have to go toward the operational expenses of administering the resources and paying ongoing maintenance and support costs. Sin said, In a recent discussion with another industry participant, the head of IT was discussing their new $500-million, state-of-the-art data center. After a technical discussion about what the new state-of-the-art data center had to offer, I found that with our new infrastructure enhancements, we are able to deliver better performance than he was projecting, despite their large investment. ESG research provides evidence that Primatics ability to deliver hyper-scale performance powered by XtremIO at a lower TCO compared with customers status quo should even motivate financial institutions with the most traditional IT mindset. 2 ESG asked more than 600 IT decision makers about their organizations most important criteria for selecting a technology vendor or solution (see Figure 1). TCO and price were the most commonly mentioned top considerations outweighing considerations such as features and functionality, service and support, and existing relationships. 2 Source: ESG Research Report, 2015 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2015.

3 ESG Case Study: Primatics Financial Delivers SaaS-based Solution Excellence Using EMC s XtremIO 3 Figure 1. Top Five Decision Criteria for Technology Solutions In general, what would you consider to be the most important criteria to your organization when it comes to selecting a technology vendor/solution? (Percent of respondents, N=601, multiple responses accepted, top five responses shown) Total cost of ownership (TCO) inclusive of capital costs, operational costs, productive benefits, etc. 43% Price 42% Product features/functionality 37% Vendor service and support 35% Existing relationship with vendor 26% The Solution Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, The Primatics story does diverge somewhat from the other stories ESG heard during its qualitative research effort. 3 Specifically, Primatics identified a sustainable path forward by migrating the Oracle-based backbone of EVOLV from a traditional disk-based, enterprise-grade array to a two-brick (four active controllers) XtremIO configuration. Primatics also invested in a third XtremIO X-Brick to support a testing and development environment able to replicate the extreme performance levels observed in production. The Benefits In ESG s discussion with Sin, several material, substantial, and quantifiable benefits revealed themselves, including: 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% Reining in costs tied to capacity growth: When it was relying on its traditional SAN infrastructure, Primatics faced the need to significantly upgrade its array every six months to keep pace with capacity demands. Today, thanks to the deduplication and compression capabilities of XtremIO, capacity expansion cycles have lengthened to 12 to 24 months. Highly scalable performance: Primatics traditional storage infrastructure was having trouble keeping pace with IOPS requirements during periods of peak demand. Since migrating to XtremIO, Primatics has seen an application performance increase big enough to essentially eliminate the risk of SLA violations. We ve seen the overall performance of our application increase by 40%, Sin said. This significantly reduces our risk of potentially missing SLAs, and provides a cushion for any hiccups should we experience it. Additionally, the performance increase seems to be boosting customer satisfaction and, consequently, boosting demand. When you do something really well, and you re showing considerable progress, the result is a more satisfied client base, who wants you to do even more for them. We re seeing a lot of that, Sin said. Improved test/development capabilities: Primatics is deriving value from XtremIO via the boost to the development environment. By dedicating an XtremIO X-Brick to supporting DevOps, Primatics is now able to 3 Source: ESG Research Report, Next-generation Storage Architectures, March 2015.

4 ESG Case Study: Primatics Financial Delivers SaaS-based Solution Excellence Using EMC s XtremIO 4 replicate its production environment more accurately. I was so impressed with XtremIO performance, that I made the recommendation to buy a smaller X-Brick for our development and test environments. I wanted our teams to be able to leverage the performance gains XtremIO could give us, so they could focus on product and process improvement, and not waiting on testing to complete To be able to have that performance level supporting our development processes has been well worth the investment, Sin said. Copy services providing agility via on-demand performance: XtremIO arrays can instantly create fullperformance, writable copies of data. Primatics has leveraged this functionality across different components of the EVOLV technology stack on XtremIO to provide an instantaneous performance boost with no downtime. Sin said, Within production, I was actually able to move a data store from the array it was on to XtremIO in 30 minutes, without any downtime. The fact that we can move data stores between two physical units with no downtime is amazing. I have the ability, in under an hour, to move a workload from whatever storage device it is on over to XtremIO for a performance boost, which is incredible. Greatly simplified scaling over time: XtremIO has architected a storage solution that is designed to simply and easily scale out as requirements change. This is a big benefit to Primatics. Sin said, If I got another X- Brick, which I m planning to do, I know that I can turn that around in a day. Which gives me a lot more flexibility and makes it significantly easier to capacity plan. Reduced administrative burden associated with storage: X-Bricks eliminate many of the administrative requirements seen with traditional storage systems. There is never a need to tune or optimize the array, and there are no complicated tiering configurations to be done. With traditional arrays, you re dealing with different storage tiers, Sin said. There are optimizations based on workloads that you have to tune over time. Then, as you increase your footprint, you see performance inconsistencies. Eventually you re spending more and more time dealing with them. With the XtremIO array, all we re really measuring now is how much space we re eating up. That is a drastically different and significantly better situation. It makes storage maintenance and monitoring a whole lot easier. What s more, Primatics achieved all the benefits in a cost-neutral manner (comparable with the expenditures that would have been required to continue running EVOLV on traditional storage). Sin said, Based on the cost of a new storage node for the old array, it isn t an apples-to-apples investment comparison, but it was very similar. And when we considered the fact that this investment would be viable to us for longer than a couple of months, the ROI advantage became quite significant. The Bigger Truth Primatics, combining its need to manage its storage growth sustainably and its desire for top-tier performance, chose to deploy EMC XtremIO and use the all-flash array to support its customer-facing EVOLV application. This transition has helped Primatics contain costs while amplifying the quality of the service it offers. Through its continuing partnership with XtremIO, Primatics is poised to make even more impressive inroads meeting the unique demands of the financial and banking client base.

5 ESG Case Study: Primatics Financial Delivers SaaS-based Solution Excellence Using EMC s XtremIO 5 20 Asylum Street Milford, MA Tel: Fax: This case study was commissioned by EMC ExtremIO and is distributed with permission. All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of the Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at (508)