Case Study: How Fractal Was Able to Speed Up Customer Insights by Fully Automating the Data Layer of Their Container Platform for the Financial & Cybersecurity Industries
Company Size
200-1,000
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Fractal OS
- Portworx PX-Enterprise
Tech Stack
- Containers
- Artificial Intelligence
- Machine Learning
- Cloud Native Storage
- Data Management
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Digital Expertise
- Innovation Output
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
- Analytics & Modeling - Machine Learning
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Fractal Industries is a software company with over 120 employees that applies artificial intelligence to solve complex, real-world problems at scale. The company has developed a next-gen Data Analytics-as-a-Service platform, Fractal OS, which combines foundational data handling, analytics, and automation with cutting-edge simulation modeling and deep learning. The platform is broadly applicable to a variety of challenging problems, but initial applications and development efforts have focused on the nexus of security, insurance, and quantitative finance. In the cybersecurity space, the company's founders recognized that the most challenging problems could only be addressed with a unified, cloud-based platform that ingests, integrates, and correlates data from every available source in real time. The distributed computing power Fractal OS provides the immediate context needed to understand what's happening on the network when it's happening, and what to do about it in order to minimize risk exposure.
The Challenge
Fractal Industries, a software company that applies artificial intelligence to solve complex, real-world problems at scale, faced a significant challenge in managing its stateful services. The company's platform, Fractal OS, needed to run in multiple environments, including their own multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure, a customer's data center, or their VPC in Amazon, Google, or Azure. However, most container orchestration platforms are built for stateless services, which are easy to scale elastically. Existing persistent storage and data management solutions didn't work across clouds and on-premises data centers, a hard requirement for Fractal's platform. Furthermore, running multiple data services at production scale required significant expertise in each service to provide high availability, backups, and disaster recovery.
The Solution
To build their integrated platform, Fractal Industries decided to use a container orchestration system. This decision was driven by the need for their software platform to run in multiple environments, including their own multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure, a customer's data center, or their VPC in Amazon, Google, or Azure. The company needed to be flexible enough to support whatever deployment worked best for the customer. However, they faced a significant challenge in managing their stateful services, as most container orchestration platforms are built for stateless services, which are easy to scale elastically. To overcome this challenge, Fractal Industries started using Portworx PX-Enterprise for cloud native storage and data management. Portworx provided a unified solution for all of Fractal's data services, reducing the number of moving parts present in the Fractal platform, easing management, and increasing reliability. Since Portworx is infrastructure agnostic, Fractal can easily deploy their platform in any customer's environment regardless of what hardware and storage systems are present.
Operational Impact
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