For SBI Securities, Pivotal GemFire’s results speak for themselves – greater performance with fewer resources. It provides extremely low latency and scales with spikes as well as usage growth over time. Importantly, GemFire also provides a more cost-effective means of managing the data tier for high-volume data industries, like an online brokerage with plans for future growth.
To learn more, visit pivotal.io/big-data/pivotal-gemfire.
Scaling API-first – The story of a global engineering organization
SBI Securities Case Study
1. In Japan, SBI Securities is the number one online securities company in the industry in terms of the number of accounts, customer assets, and individual brokerage trading value. Operated by SBI Holdings, they have over 2.6 million securities accounts as of March 2013 and handle trading in the U.S., China (Hong Kong), South Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. The company offers trading via their website, applications, and smartphone websites. With 1,312 funds available, the trading system is mission critical. Not only can any downtime stop revenue; it can also create significant publicity and consumer satisfaction issues.
CHALLENGE
Scaling Multi-Site Systems, Still a Database Bottleneck
SBI Securities built its online trading system with the typical, three-tier architecture of the time – web servers, application servers, and database servers. As its security accounts rapidly grew, the technology team began to see issues with system performance and realized the database server had become the bottleneck. To address the issue, the team decided to deploy a duplicate of the system that was partitioned for adding new customers. However, maintaining multiple sites and systems added a burden in terms of risk, complexity, capital costs, and operational overhead. SBI needed a new approach to scaling
the data tier.
According to Yozo Ito, General Manager at Hitachi Ltd, whose company directed the implementation, “Our top goals were around improved latency, scale, and cost. Since the existing system was expensive and underperforming, we would not be able to keep customers satisfied and improve margins.” SBI needed to find a solution with low latency under increasing load and the ability to scale out as accounts and transaction volume increased. The company also wanted to reduce costs by removing duplicate systems that were originally created as partitions for scaling purposes. Of course, SBI required the data be redundant, recoverable, reliable, consistent, and safe. As they began working
AT-A-GLANCE
Challenges
•
Existing three-tier, RDBMS-driven online trading system faced performance problems
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Initial solution to duplicate and partition the system drove up costs
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Ensuring customer satisfaction remained high through system scale and account growth
Solution
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Pivotal GemFire
Key Benefits
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Provided lower latency under load than traditional databases
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Reduced costs, complexity, and risk
•
Scaled the data tier
CASE STUDY
SBI Securities
ACHIEVING SIGNIFICANT ROI WITH IMPROVED
PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY
OVERVIEW
“ When we first chose to partition our existing
system, we knew the costs would increase significantly. As we chose Pivotal GemFire, we
knew some code had to change, but the overall, bottom-line cost structure went down significantly for capital and operating expenses.”
— Yozo Ito, General Manager, Hitachi Ltd
pivotal.io