The Challenge
Hyper Converged Architecture – Case Study:
The customer provides guaranteed clearing and settlement functions for transactions in G-Securities, Foreign Exchange and Derivatives markets. They also offer non-guaranteed settlement for Rupee interest-rate derivatives and cross-currency transactions. They have been ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified in 2015 by DNV GL, a global quality assurance and risk management company, for securing their information assets. Likewise, they are now recognized as a Qualified Central Counterparty (QCCP) by the Reserve Bank of India in 2014. The customer had an aging inventory that needed refresh/renewals. They were looking for a design solution to helped them save on their datacenter space, reduce the number of software licenses, and lower their power/cooling costs. They were looking for a solution that is in line with the latest technology, and also priced within their desired budget.
The Solution
Galaxy team analyzed their existing design and suggested a hyper converged architecture based on the Dell FX platform. This infrastructure system has a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch, in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor. It primarily allows the integrated technologies to be managed as a single system through a common toolset.
VMware vRealize is the virtualization solution that was recommended to the customer. vRealize software provides operations management across physical, virtual and cloud environments, and these can be based on anything from vSphere, Hyper-V to Amazon Web Services. We installed a Dell PowerEdge modular storage & server, which enables demanding workloads with powerful, highly dense, and scalable computing. This IT service platform helps scale efficiently and predictably while drastically reducing complexity. It provides plenty of compute, memory, storage, connectivity and chassis options to let you configure servers for specific workloads.
The Benefits
Galaxy could bring significant cost-savings for the company, associated with regular business operations. The hyper-converged architecture is fairly compact, and its server and storage systems reside in the same box. Therefore, we do not require a separate SAN storage to be installed with additional complexity of external SAN switches and cables. This new solution also reduced their power consumption considerably, which was one of their pain areas earlier. On the VMware side, because we could pack more cores onto the same physical platform, we were able to reduce the license window substantially. All this was provided within the allotted budget the customer had set aside for the inventory renewal.