In Planning for the future depends on making the right kinds of long term investments. Whether its to create wealth, beat inflation or achieve financial goals like paying for college and retirement, a complete understanding of investment options is crucial in making the right financing decisions. However, the sheer number of available stock options and investment choices require a partner that will view investing from the customers viewpoint and simplify the entire process. Different customers will have different needs, necessitating a partner with the ability to provide relevant recommendations and suggestions based on extensive insight and information.
Kotak Securities Ltd., a 100% subsidiary of Kotak Mahindra Bank, is one of the oldest and largest stock brokers in the industry with offerings that include stock broking services for trading through the branch and the Internet, investments in IPO, mutual funds and portfolio management services. With a full-fledged research division involved in macroeconomic studies and company specific equity combined with a strong and well networked sales force, Kotak Securities is able to deliver current and up-todate market information and news.
As a depository participant with both National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) and Central Depository Services Limited (CDSL), Kotak Securities offer dual benefits with stock broking services for executing transactions and depository services for settling them.
Business Situation With a network spanning over 400 cities with 1200 outlets, Kotak Securities has been growing rapidly leading to an exponential increase in data volume.
In order to sustain high performance and maintain data reliability, it would need centralized administration consolidating diverse storage silos into one area. In short, Kotak Securities required a storage infrastructure with the capability to scale on demand and maintain business process continuity.
Additionally, the storage environment needed to be simple and efficient while ensuring that data is readily available.
The current storage landscape included Enterprise Storage, SVC Clusters at the Primary Site and Midrange Storage and SVC Clusters at the DR site. While Kotak Securities wanted to leverage the benefits of the existing storage infrastructure, there remained several key issues that needed to be addressed. Information retention is critical with much of the data stored in an online store that needs to be both extremely reliable and high performing.
With the ever-increasing data volume, backup needs to be stretched for a longer time while recent trends such as virtualization had to be adopted.
With tight budgets Kotak Securities needed to balance acquisition and operating costs and extract complete value for money. Some of the benefits that Kotak Securities were looking to incorporate included:
New Storage for various applications including VMware
HA functionality for the production data
Scalability to cater to future growth
Disaster Recovery capabilities for critical applications using Asynchronous / long distance data replication
Leverage the benefits of current storage infrastructure
Solution Implementation
Kotak Securities evaluated multiple storage infrastructures from different vendors before settling on IBMs XIV storage systems.
IBM participated in the VMware data migration from the existing DS8300 system to the XIV storage using VMotion Capabilities. The production data was also moved to the XIV system, which would then act as a failover for the DS8300. As the data needed to be accessible 24/7, the XIV system needed to keep the data available in case of downtime. The main objective of the new storage system was to ensure that Kotak services remain uninterrupted in case of any failure or technical glitches.
Kotak moved the complete VMware Data to XIV and Production Data was also copied to the XIV storage under SVC. The production Data on XIV will act as a failover for the As a High Availability requirement, the goal was to keep the services stay online (available) in case of any failures, or the service can resume quickly if interrupted (without interrupting client functions).
The new storage system is virtualized using IBMs SVC (SAN Volume Controller) software designed to take control and retain existing information.
It helps speed and simplify data management while helping minimize the need for additional storage. IBMs SVC also introduced a completely new graphic user interface designed for easy usage and included many built-in recommendations to help simplify storage provisioning and utilize a rapid learning curve.
The IBM XIV Storage System operates on innovative grid architecture while tackling almost every aspect related to owning, operating and maintaining a storage system, including backup and restore, acquisition, administration and downtime cost factors. The innovative grid architecture eliminates bottlenecks and hotspots reducing the possibility of disk or component failure.
Outstanding availability and reliability are delivered through a revolutionary redundancy scheme, enabling automated self healing with rapid rebuild times. Using VDisk Mirroring, the SVC writes the same data onto two storage regions residing in different Managed Disk Groups (MDGs) on different back-end storage subsystems.
This capability ensures data availability even if a back-end storage subsystem fails completely.
Functionalities such as snapshotting, thin provisioning and space reclamation, and remote mirroring can improve asset utilization and protect business data from unexpected outages. In addition to revolutionizing the storage infrastructure, IBMs XIV system offered the simple and unified solution Kotak Securities sought, through a single-tier platform and intuitive management.
Benefits
IBM incorporated industry standard components in its storage system rather than specialized and vendorspecific components, enabling advanced software functionality to be combined with the advantage of commodity components costs for the underlying physical system. Kotak Securities can take the advantage of this feature for upgrades and new application consolidation requirements that may come up in the future.
The intelligent distribution algorithm and parallelism in the new storage infrastructure ensured that no single disk or component becomes a bottleneck. As a result of XIVs impressive self healing capability, in case of a disk failure, all disks participate in the recovery to reduce downtime and avoid further failures.
Performance is also maintained during the addition or removal of hardware by redistributing the load across all disks to keep the system balanced. Kotak Securities can therefore run critical business applications without reliability and performance issues generally faced by traditional storage systems.
Kotak Securities new storage architecture is flexible enough to address the requirements of different workloads as each application is able to get simultaneous performance from all disks. This would not only reduce the effort required to complete complicated design tasks but also decrease the time necessary to provision storage for various applications with no administrative overheads.
Most critical applications need to be up and running all the time while simultaneously backing and storing data. Using the snapshot functionalities the XIV storage system can create multiple copies for the testing and development requirements of Kotak Securities without impacting production. This feature aids easy data recovery using any of the multiple snapshots present in storage system and reduces the downtime required for storage provisioning.
Data migration from other systems to XIV was achieved by IBM using a phased approach and working closely with Kotak Securities. The storage system was able to absorb new workloads quickly and without any noticeable degradation in performance.
Typically enterprises require technical expertise to implement and maintain large and fairly complicated applications. However IBMs XIV was extremely easy to use and configure and removed the criticality associated with storage management from Kotak Securities.
Finally, the thin provisioning capabilities of the XIV system allow Kotak Securities to use less physical space and remain alert to any eventuality by constantly monitoring storage consumption and sending notifications when space utilization exceeds a user-defined threshold.
Add new comment