Need to Monitor Latency, Performance and Throughput at Micro-Second Level Drives Investment Firm’s Purchase of nGenius Solution
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
- Asia
- Europe
Country
- United States
- Other
Product
- nGenius Solution
- InfiniStream appliances
Tech Stack
- Oracle database
- Citrix-based applications
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
The customer is a leading sector index options trading firm and one of the largest liquidity providers in Exchange Traded Funds. With offices throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, the company is focused on trading, investment banking, private equity, venture capital, institutional sales, and research. It is among North America’s largest option market makers, is the leading sector index options trading firm, and is one of the largest liquidity providers in Exchange traded funds. With 1100 traders, the company places a strong emphasis on technology to stay competitive in the fast-changing, increasingly automated market trading industry where any disruption to the network can mean lost profits, dissatisfied customers, or even potential lawsuits. The company uses a state-of-the-art infrastructure that includes 1500+ servers; an Oracle® database environment; Citrix® based applications; a globally distributed WAN supporting messaging middleware and market data services; and a modern 10,000 square foot data center.
The Challenge
The leading sector index options trading firm and one of the largest liquidity providers in Exchange Traded Funds was facing challenges with their network performance. The network regularly experienced traffic bursts which caused retransmissions and delayed transaction speeds. Their existing historical reporting tools offered only five- or fifteen-minute averaging, which did not provide the granularity needed to see when and where these spikes were occurring or to determine the cause of these threshold violations. In addition, troubleshooting was tedious and frustrating as the tool could only capture packets on demand, making it challenging to catch intermittent problems in action. The need for millisecond-level visibility into market data transactions drove the move to permanently instrument key locations to provide a unified, end-to-end approach to evaluating application performance and latency issues.
The Solution
To address these challenges, the network operations team began looking for a solution that could provide subsecond level alerts when peak thresholds were reached on critical applications and links, and to also continuously capture and store packets for retrospective problem reconstruction. After an extensive search, the company purchased the nGenius® solution to assure that its traders got the response time they needed to succeed. The nGenius solution not only provided the necessary one-minute granularity with millisecond peak reporting intervals, but also microburst alarming on utilization of both physical and virtual circuits. For its initial deployment, the operation group chose to instrument its dedicated WAN with several InfiniStream® appliances placed strategically in their data center and most active business locations. The purchased InfiniStream appliances were configured with 8TB of hot swappable, redundant power and drive options that enable 24x7 continuous packet capture and back-in-time analysis.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Real-time In-vehicle Monitoring
The telematic solution provides this vital premium-adjusting information. The solution also helps detect and deter vehicle or trailer theft – as soon as a theft occurs, monitoring personnel can alert the appropriate authorities, providing an exact location.“With more and more insurance companies and major fleet operators interested in monitoring driver behaviour on the grounds of road safety, efficient logistics and costs, the market for this type of device and associated e-business services is growing rapidly within Italy and the rest of Europe,” says Franco.“The insurance companies are especially interested in the pay-per-use and pay-as-you-drive applications while other organisations employ the technology for road user charging.”“One million vehicles in Italy currently carry such devices and forecasts indicate that the European market will increase tenfold by 2014.However, for our technology to work effectively, we needed a highly reliable wireless data network to carry the information between the vehicles and monitoring stations.”
Case Study
Safety First with Folksam
The competitiveness of the car insurance market is driving UBI growth as a means for insurance companies to differentiate their customer propositions as well as improving operational efficiency. An insurance model - usage-based insurance ("UBI") - offers possibilities for insurers to do more efficient market segmentation and accurate risk assessment and pricing. Insurers require an IoT solution for the purpose of data collection and performance analysis
Case Study
Smooth Transition to Energy Savings
The building was equipped with four end-of-life Trane water cooled chillers, located in the basement. Johnson Controls installed four York water cooled centrifugal chillers with unit mounted variable speed drives and a total installed cooling capacity of 6,8 MW. Each chiller has a capacity of 1,6 MW (variable to 1.9MW depending upon condenser water temperatures). Johnson Controls needed to design the equipment in such way that it would fit the dimensional constraints of the existing plant area and plant access route but also the specific performance requirements of the client. Morgan Stanley required the chiller plant to match the building load profile, turn down to match the low load requirement when needed and provide an improvement in the Energy Efficiency Ratio across the entire operating range. Other requirements were a reduction in the chiller noise level to improve the working environment in the plant room and a wide operating envelope coupled with intelligent controls to allow possible variation in both flow rate and temperature. The latter was needed to leverage increased capacity from a reduced number of machines during the different installation phases and allow future enhancement to a variable primary flow system.
Case Study
Automated Pallet Labeling Solution for SPR Packaging
SPR Packaging, an American supplier of packaging solutions, was in search of an automated pallet labeling solution that could meet their immediate and future needs. They aimed to equip their lines with automatic printer applicators, but also required a solution that could interface with their accounting software. The challenge was to find a system that could read a 2D code on pallets at the stretch wrapper, track the pallet, and flag any pallets with unread barcodes for inspection. The pallets could be single or double stacked, and the system needed to be able to differentiate between the two. SPR Packaging sought a system integrator with extensive experience in advanced printing and tracking solutions to provide a complete traceability system.
Case Study
Transforming insurance pricing while improving driver safety
The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the car insurance industry on a scale not seen since the introduction of the car itself. For decades, premiums have been calculated using proxy-based risk assessment models and historical data. Today, a growing number of innovative companies such as Quebec-based Industrielle Alliance are moving to usage-based insurance (UBI) models, driven by the advancement of telematics technologies and smart tracking devices.
Case Study
Enhancing Security and Compliance in Remitly's Global Money Transfer Service with Fastly
Remitly, an online remittance service, was faced with the challenge of securing its proprietary global transfer network. The company needed a security solution that could meet PCI requirements and protect customers' sensitive transactions through its mobile application. The solution had to be capable of defending against new and emerging attack types without impacting performance. Remitly also had to deal with irregular traffic patterns, such as a sudden spike in account transfers from a small network segment on the Pacific coastline of South America. The company needed to determine in real time whether such traffic indicated an attack or valid requests. A traditional web application firewall (WAF) would not be able to distinguish this traffic, potentially leading to customer frustration if the IP was blacklisted.
