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Success Story
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Appro / Avocent Blade PC Solution is Solid Achiever for leading institutional brokerage firm. |
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Download this Success Story ----
Making a solid IT Investment:
When it comes to buying or selling stocks, timing is everything. Speed of execution – the process of buying or selling stock - is one of the most important challenges facing nearly every financial institution. Seconds can make a difference in a buy or sell price and traders rely on technology solutions to get their job done fast and accurately to deliver the best service and investment performance for their clients.
Capital Institutional Services, Inc. (CAPIS), an institutional brokerage firm, wanted to improve the speed, availability and efficiency of internal systems to the benefit of their financial traders. They invested in a compact blade pc solution. Almost immediately, CAPIS traders experienced increased machine horsepower and increased screen real estate. The solution also delivered decreased deployment time and maintenance along with better flexibility for the IT support staff.
CAPIS is a leading U.S. agency-only institutional brokerage firm founded in 1977. Their business is built on providing global agency trading, advanced order execution, and independent research distribution for asset managers and plan sponsors. As one of the few independent institutional brokerages, CAPIS address the diverse needs of fund managers, money managers, and broker-dealers alike, while remaining objective and unbiased when it comes to providing the best possible execution services. CAPIS maintains offices in Dallas and New York and is a member of the NYSE, AMEX, PCX, NASD, and SIPC.
Prior to investing in a blade PC solution, CAPIS transitioned from having individual workstations located under a trader’s desk to centralizing machines in a controlled data center using KVM extenders. With workstations on the trading floor, the environmental demands created inherent problems that compromised system availability and performance. Using a standard KVM extender, CAPIS isolated the processors and moved them to an upstairs computer room. Off the floor and removed to a controlled, secure data center, technology issues with the computers, such as unintentional physical contact and environmental concerns, were alleviated. However, the solution was not designed for the intensely graphical environment of the trading floor.
“Most back office computers and servers are designed for large storage ‘tanks’ or for fast processing operations,” explained Wesley Wempner, assistant vice president for CAPIS technology/support. “What we needed for our trading department was high-end processor power coupled with intense graphics capabilities.”
The search for a solution
With limited space and a desire for a compact server solution that would enable high graphical capability, IT architects at CAPIS designed their own solution. The result was a 1U-thick, rack-mounted unit with their own operating system and graphics card. Thirty units were compressed into a small space with two thick cables for each machine coming off the back. Keyboard, video, mouse and other peripheral equipment was also crammed in which created cable management and heat dissipation issues.
“The physical connectivity mode became extremely difficult to manage and it was extremely challenging to troubleshoot,” said Wempner. “If you tried to repair a physical problem there was a good chance you would hurt something else in the process.” The frequent physical moves typical of most financial institutions also resulted in a high failure rate for the KVM extenders – the machines simply failed to return to service after a move. In addition to challenges faced by their current configuration, technology needs such as parallel printing and BlackBerry devices required computer hookups that traders simply did not have access to on the floor.
Needing to increase horsepower at traders’ individual machines, extend KVM capabilities while improving the stability of that operation, and give traders more choices down at the desk, prompted Wempner’s team to investigate blade servers.
The right choice
“Even though they were great as servers, blade servers were not designed for our needs – to accommodate a machine with high processor and superior graphics capability,” said Wempner. “We came across one blade server with built in graphics but expandability was limited. We did not want to invest in a technology that couldn’t scale to meet our needs. What we needed was a solution that would help accomplish our goal of keeping the processor and its primary components isolated. At the same time, we wanted to retain our KVM capability and add the USB ports without compromising our potential scalability needs.”
Searching online, Wempner learned about the Appro Blade PC solution. Appro is a leading developer of high-performance enterprise servers. They partner with Avocent digital extension solutions to deliver a viable substitute for standard desktop PCs in enterprises that value tighter security, better optimized floor space and lower operating costs.
The Avocent award-winning PCI bus extension solution is the only digital transport method available today between a desktop and remote PC. A small footprint desktop appliance receives the PCI bus signal allowing for full PC functionality without the physical PC at the end-user’s location.
Currently CAPIS has six Appro HyperBlade servers in service with Intel P4 processors and are prepared to expand up to 16 within the next few months. Each Appro blade is running one digital extension appliance per station and driving dual monitors.
“The reason we chose the Appro/Avocent cluster solution was its winning design. It could successfully extend KVM while providing additional peripheral support away from the PC. At the same time it decreased the amount of cable management required,” said Wempner. “It also allowed the best scalability versus other solutions we compared it to.”
The solution is exceeding CAPIS’ business needs by increasing efficiencies, delivering faster processing capabilities and better graphics while keeping the microprocessor and critical components in a secure, controlled environment.
Avocent Digital Desktops is a pioneer in digital bus extension technology and distributed computing. Appro focuses on the high-performance computing (HPC) and cluster markets as well as Blade PC solutions for the desktop replacement markets. For more information, visit www.appro.com
“From a technical hardware management solution, we are experiencing a 66 percent time savings,” said Wempner. “For these big quarterly moves, what used to take us 12 hours now happens in about four with the Appro solution.”
“The Appro/Avocent cluster solution helped our business by giving us the increased horsepower and screen real estate desired by the user and decreased time of maintenance, deployment and increased flexibility required by our IT staff.”
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Appro is focusing its product design to address the HPC cluster
market and key customer requirements including system management,
high availability and price/performance for HPC applications.
Appro has shown the ability to win highly sought-after, large-scale
HPC deals positioning the company to benefit from strong market
growth that IDC projects through 2012.
Earl
Joseph,
IDC Program Vice President, Technical Computing
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Customer Quote
“Appro not only offered us a cost effective solution but
they also improved our required technical specification through
better reliability, greater fault tolerance and redundancy as
well as more flexibility with regards to system scalability.”
Bob Bell,
Technical Director, ING Renault F1 Team
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