Tradition-ICAP has chosen to use Violin all-flash arrays to support its Volbroker foreign exchange platform.
Volbroker, the trading platform for foreign exchange professionals, will use the technology to increase its capacity to process data for options trading. It will also reduce Oracle database rebuild and maintenance times by more than forty times.
All-flash arrays contain multiple flash memory drives which are much faster and more-energy efficient than spinning hard disk drives.
Their application in financial services comes from the ever-increasing complexity and volume of financial trades, with city professionals potentially losing competitive advantage if platforms run at below optimum speed.
"Even when loading everything into memory there were times that data would leave the cache and the Oracle database had to directly access the storage subsystem, and at peak times, the entire system would spend excessive amounts of time waiting for our traditional storage subsystem," said Terry Benson, COO at Tradition-ICAP.
He added: "We needed a solution that eliminated the storage bottleneck and delivered consistent low latency and high IOPS at all times. Violin all-flash arrays exceeded our expectations and are clearly the best choice for our business. Using Violin arrays we have eliminated any worries about supporting our growing business, and we can concentrate on developing the new technologies that will help our customers to be even more successful in their trading."
"Violin all-flash arrays are perfect for time-sensitive applications, such as foreign exchange trading, where a millisecond is worth hundreds of millions of pounds," added Mick Bradley, Managing Director, Violin Memory EMEA. "The solution’s reliability, high-performance and data availability characteristics are critical to this market, where even a few seconds delay can have major financial consequences."
IMAGE: Scott Prokop
