Location, location
De-risking datacenter relocation
UK investment bank de-risk the outsourcing of HPC grid and achieve significant
cost savings with Sumerian predictive analytics
The challenge
The trading arm of a large UK investment bank needed to expand its high
performance computing (HPC) grid to absorb the trading levels of its newly
merged organization. Due to space constraints and an objective to reduce
costs, the bank wanted to outsource the grid from its City of London location
to a new, more cost-effective datacenter outside the M25. The primary goal
of the move was to find the right balance between performance and cost,
while ensuring that this highly sensitive trading environment was not affected
by any latency issues. Because of the major business risk this presented, the IT
team needed to provide assurances that end-user performance and links to
external trading systems were not going to be impacted.
Why Sumerian?
The bank believed the use of Sumerian’s predictive analytics would allow
them to accurately scenario model all aspects of the planned migration and
successfully de-risk this major £300M investment program.
Sumerian solution
Sumerian’s first step was to create a baseline model of the existing trading
environment grid infrastructure, and the applications under migration consideration. The model included detailed measurements of existing application
performance and task execution time, to establish a baseline of pre-change
application latency and throughout.
Using this model Sumerian then applied predictive scenario modeling to
determine whether application performance would be impacted by any
latency issues from a move to the new datacenter location, and what type of
datacenter hosting configuration was required to achieve the most optimal
balance between performance and cost. For example, whether applications should be hosted solely at the new, more cost-effective location, spread
across both locations or remain at the existing datacenter. From the results of
this analysis Sumerian was able to recommend the most optimal post-move
deployment architecture, including which parts of the infrastructure and
component software needed to be altered to meet latency and throughput
requirements in the post-change environment.
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Outcome and results
Sumerian’s analytics showed that latency impact varied across the application suite, and also depended heavily on where the latency was introduced.
As a result, Sumerian was able to make specific recommendations on how
to ensure capacity at the new datacenter was rightsized, and deploy the
applications in a way that avoided any impact to business performance and
derisked the migration.
In parallel, Sumerian was able to make specific recommendations to the
application development teams on the amount of capacity required to
ensure all applications were optimized to reduce their exposure to latency.
These recommendations were then implemented by the development teams
in advance of the move.
Above all, by using Sumerian to quantify and model the applications’ latency
requirements against the various scenarios under consideration, the IT team
gained the validation it needed to ensure the new outsourced grid datacenter could uphold levels of performance demanded by the business – but also
realize multi-million pound cost savings.
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Copyright © 2014 Sumerian Europe
More information
To find out more about our client stories,
just give us a call on 0131 226 9300, drop
an email to [email protected] or visit
our website at www.sumerian.com
July 2014