Major Financial Services Company Reduces Market Feed Latency, Improves Financial Application Performance

Customer Profile

This international financial services company strives to support millions of customers, leveraging the combined resources of thousands of employees around the world to deliver innovative service offerings and an unwavering focus on their customers.

Minimizing costs is a core value for this company and a key to financial success for both the business and their investors. With more than $1 trillion in assets under management, this philosophy has stood them in good stead for many years.

The Challenge

The company’s portfolio includes mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and brokerage services. As a result, customers and employees rely on critical financial and web-based applications and business services for important functions, such as making investment decisions and monitoring performance of stock trading and market data feeds to help them manage trillions of dollars in investments.

The company began experiencing limitations with the performance they were receiving from the legacy information technology (IT) operating in their data center. A particularly troublesome issue was application owners were struggling to maintain visibility into the performance of financial business services. The IT application owners knew the importance of finding and resolving any latencies as quickly as possible. Slow market data feeds have a potentially massive fiscal impact in the financial services marketplace.

While the company had deployed legacy NETSCOUT technology for many years, the Network Operations (NetOps) team primarily used the packet data collected by InfiniStream® data sources for post-event forensic support solutions rather than real-time visibility and monitoring.

Understanding the detrimental effects these application and service performance limitations could potentially have on the business and their customers, the bank made the decision to upgrade the data center. With the importance of this project, IT executives also wanted to manage risk by engaging in pre-production activities prior to full data center rollout. At the same time, it was important that cost containment prevail in this project.

For the NetOps team, this data center upgrade presented an opportunity to refresh their service assurance infrastructure and take advantage of real-time visibility into key metrics around latency, utilization, availability, and application errors, especially those occurring in their financial market data feeds.

Solution in Action

To ensure the best outcomes, this long-time customer turned to NETSCOUT to help deploy the most complete and cost-effective solution to expand their visibility and protect business-critical applications and services.

The company selected a solution based the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform in combination with the InfiniStreamNG™ software deployed in commercial-off-the-shelf appliances to view the wide area network traffic passing in and out of the new data center.

Service assurance is so essential to this organization’s delivery of customer facing applications, the company is enhancing their disaster recovery protection by deploying the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform with a Standby Server. The company’s real-time service assurance environment now benefits from the redundancy offered by the Standby Server maintaining a full copy of the database in an Active/Active connection to the nGeniusONE server.

The NETSCOUT Premium Support Services team provided installation services to support the company’s efforts to deploy the nGeniusONE and COTS ISNG platforms in their pre-production environment.

The Results

A new data center deployment is a massively complex project for any IT team. In reducing their risk, the IT team immediately recognized the value that nGeniusONE’s Smart Analytics and NETSCOUT Smart Data would bring to the company’s extended pre-production data center phase. IT is using the NETSCOUT solution as part of the critical path leading toward eventual production deployment by conducting application analysis and testing with the nGeniusONE platform to validate data center design and performance. With the enhanced visibility provided by the ISNG appliance, IT is able to ensure that migrating services from the old location to the new facility goes smoothly, and service delivery is assured end-to-end throughout the transition.

The application owners glean better insights into market data feed application latency and performance through the ISNG appliances strategically deployed in the bank’s new data center environment, with NETSCOUT technology converting packet data into Smart Data. In realizing extended return on investment from NETSCOUT, the company’s existing InfiniStream appliances deployed in other locations continue to provide visibility and reactive troubleshooting information. These improvements help IT get ahead of problems before they arise, overall reducing downtime, and helping them to stay informed and credible in front of end users. Ultimately, IT will gain the knowledge they need to protect the business and maintain customer confidence.

Through their previous experience with NETSCOUT, the company already knew the value of InfiniStreamNG appliances and Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology. With the additional visibility, the IT team is moving forward with confidence and meeting budgetary guidelines by deploying COTS-based ISNG software on NETSCOUT-certified appliances to acquire hardware that bundles ISNG software directly from an authorized reseller, while receiving hardware and software support directly from NETSCOUT.