Aegis Software
Aegis selects StoreVault for enhanced storage capabilities
Customer Overview
Since its inception in 1994, Aegis Software has been designing powerful, sophisticated and easy to use trading software and services. Their software is targeted towards financial organizations that put performance, robustness, availability, and flexibility above everything. Aegis has developed Athena, an Execution Management System (EMS) for Equities, Options, Futures, and Foreign Exchange trading. Apart from standard trading solutions, Aegis’ testing products – Exchange Simulator, Client Simulator and T3 – are considered the industry standard for automated, regression, interactive and performance testing of FIX-based trading systems.
Customer Challenges
With about 75 employees and an equal number of workstations, Aegis used 25 Dell servers to manage about 1 TB of DAS on Dell internal storage. Data management involved taking standard, full backups from a backup server using ArcServe 11 on a daily basis to an SDLT320 tape library. Every week, data was sent offsite to ensure maximum data recovery in case of a disaster. Within a year, there has been up to 40% growth in the organization, with the number of employees going up to 70 from 50. Naturally, data storage requirement for email and MS SQL database for MS Great Plains, Symantec IM Manager and proprietary applications was increasing consistently. Many servers were straining to meet storage demands as they were running at 90-95% of their capacity. Blade servers had limited local storage capacity with no expansion capabilities. Some of them had completely exhausted their storage space numerous times in the last year and daily maintenance activity like deleting or moving files to a different location to ensure smooth operations was time consuming.
Emails were fast becoming a concern with the Exchange server struggling to perform and utilizing almost its entire capacity with nearly 200 GB in storage groups. Compounding this with a new business requirement for an email archiving system would have resulted in data growth which DAS could not sustain any more. Raised expectations for continuous service reliability and data availability required to migrate from a single Exchange 2003 server to an Exchange 2007 system with 4 redundant clustered mailbox servers for high availability. This further required a shared storage device between the clustered servers.
With significant data growth, Aegis faced a new business requirement for fault tolerance on all critical systems. Additional hardware such as redundant internet connections and routers, clustered firewalls and multiple SMTP gateways had to be introduced. Along with this, a distributed exchange environment, email archiving, and a secondary office location for data replication became imperative. A SAN based storage was part of this larger initiative.
Solution: StoreVault S500
At Aegis, Aaron Laskowski, Senior Systems Engineer wanted to upgrade the entire infrastructure for fault tolerance with a SAN solution. After considering solutions from HP, Dell and EMC, he decided to investigate StoreVault, which came highly recommended from his VAR Nick Ruddy from HorizonTek. Aaron opted for StoreVault after realizing that StoreVault was a feature-rich solution for fault tolerance and its performance levels were matchless.
At present, Aaron has one StoreVault unit with nine 500 GB drives. One of these drives is a hot spare, while 2 are for parity and double parity. There is also a FibreChannel Card. Aaron prefers to use the fibre channel because it doesn’t add load to already choked LAN bandwidth. The StoreVault is connected to the fiber channel as well as the Ethernet network. The Exchange server, mail archiving system which runs on MS SQL, a couple of the development servers, VOIP for PBX (voice mail data storage) and most of the other blade servers running proprietary applications are connected to StoreVault using the fibre channel. StoreVault also hosts a couple of directories accessed by end users using CIFS over LAN.
Customer Experience
Aaron is enthused with Store Vault. He says “StoreVault allowed us to simultaneously address our multiple issues of inadequate direct attached storage, server clustering, and file server consolidation - all at an incredible price of $15000. It is one of the best investments we have made in our infrastructure.”
He also adds “Nick Ruddy at HorizonTek was my sales rep and was of tremendous help from when we were first considering StoreVault all the way to post installation. Their knowledge and assistance in answering my questions and educating me about StoreVault configurations and fault tolerance was a primary factor for our decision to choose StoreVault as our SAN solution.”
Customer Benefits
StoreVault has rendered Aegis with higher competency levels by eliminating direct attached storage space limitation problems on servers. By enhancing server clustering capability by providing shared storage through the fibre channel, StoreVault allows for highly available network services. Moreover, no other SAN solution in this price range had Fibre Channel capability which became a unique selling point for StoreVault.
Tangible benefits are better performance and less downtime for all users. Aaron is busy counting money as Aegis trading software performs better than ever with StoreVault.
