American brokerage and banking company replaces a RAM-based cache on a relational database with Aerospike to successfully achieve Speed at Scale
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Aerospike
- DB2
- Mongo DB
- Gigaspaces
- Gemfire
Tech Stack
- Solid State Drives (SSD)
- Flash-Optimization
- Key-Value Store
- XDR (Cross Data Center Replication)
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
- Remote Asset Management
- Remote Control
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The customer is a very large American brokerage and banking company that serves more than 10 million customers and processes over 250 million transactions daily. The company is heavily reliant on mobile applications to interact with its customers, who use these apps to check balances, transfer funds, pay bills, and make deposits. The institution aims to provide accurate and timely financial data, including stock quotes, trade order status, and account balances, to help customers make informed personal finance decisions. The company’s IT infrastructure was previously based on a combination of a relational database management system (RDBMS) and a RAM-based cache, which was fronting a traditional mainframe database. However, this setup was unable to consistently support the growing workloads during trading hours, leading to performance issues, system crashes, and data inconsistencies. The company needed a more scalable and reliable solution to meet its strategic goals and provide a seamless customer experience.
The Challenge
To scale without barriers, provide superlative customer experience, and continue to introduce new, engaging mobile applications, this very large financial institution had to rethink its infrastructure. Continuing with a relational database and cache-based solution as the intraday system of record would require scaling from 150 servers to more than 1,000 servers. This was not a practical strategy in terms of time, labor, and operating cost. More important for the business, reliance on nightly batch processing from the intraday system to the master DB2 (book of record) was expensive, and still didn’t solve the data inconsistencies between stored and active data. A new solution had to address: The company’s decision to continue to leverage its legacy mainframe database (DB2), which was the compliant system of record for more than 10 million customer accounts. The requirement to process 250 million transactions and 2 million updates a day, and the ability to update stock prices or show balances on 300 million positions in near real time. The ability to create enough compute capacity to eliminate data inconsistencies. The elimination of frequent system crashes due to overloading the RAM-based cache and the subsequent restarts, which frequently took around an hour. The mandate for a cost-effective solution that would address expectations for 1,000% data growth as it executed on its mobile strategy.
The Solution
The company’s IT department explored several options and quickly realized that Aerospike was the only solution that could provide the required performance. Rather than use expensive yet unreliable RAM, the bank preferred Aerospike’s ability to leverage solid state drives (SSD), also known as Enterprise Flash. Enterprise Flash pushes down costs and increases reliability because it has much greater storage density than RAM (thus requiring fewer servers) and immediate data persistence. Competitors included Mongo DB, Gigaspaces, and Gemfire, which were eliminated from consideration for a variety of reasons. Mongo DB couldn’t provide low read latency at a high write load. It was also not flash-optimized so it could not significantly reduce server count. Gigaspaces is an application-centric cache solution and guarantees vary based on the database layer choice. Its architecture ties applications to the distribution layer, making it impossible to efficiently access data from multiple clients. Gemfire needed at least 4x more nodes and could not deliver predictable performance with low latency at high throughput. Aerospike’s database technology, which is now the bank’s intraday system of record, enables high throughput with low latency, horizontal scalability, availability, and operational efficiency. Key Aerospike features such as flash-optimization, key-value store, and XDR (cross data center replication) are delivering unmatched Speed at Scale with no loss of data. Because Aerospike enabled the bank to leverage its traditional database (DB2), Aerospike was ideally suited to function as the intraday system of record. Now, the daily workload is created and managed in Aerospike, while the historical data (and a few core applications) are managed separately in the traditional RDBMS.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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