Gear6 Solution Brief: Financial Analytics

Introduction

The unique characteristics of the financial services industry put extreme demands on the scalability and performance of core applications and systems, particularly in the area of financial analytics. Extremely large data sets and the need to compute a virtually endless number of permutations lead to intense data processing requirements in very short time frames. When trading or risk management decisions are on the line, every second counts.

Financial managers need the highest performing tools and systems for:

• Scenario simulations
• Financial risk and compliance management
• Real time analysis and business intelligence
• Price equilibrium models
• Pre-deal credit limit monitoring

The Challenges

Financial managers constantly strive to make the most informed decisions quickly. Given that time is rarely on their side, these professionals rely on underlying IT infrastructure to assist in generating valuable calculations to aid in the process. The complexity of today’s financial markets, combined with the analysis moving from overnight to intra-day trading puts even more pressure on financial services companies to deliver information and analytics in real time.

IT systems that rely solely on mechanical disks cannot keep up with the needs and capabilities of sophisticated applications and the advanced processing power of multi-core servers. This causes issues such as:

• Slow response times leading to delayed decision making placing assets at risk
• Inability to sustain peak workloads during times of heavy trading
• Excessive tuning required just to maintain minimum operations

Gear6 Solution for Financial Analytics

Gear6 addresses the need for real time performance in financial analytics with centralized storage caching, and approach that enhances existing disk-based storage solutions with scalable, high-capacity caching appliances. This solution offers a number of benefits:

• Serving data from low latency memory as opposed to disk reduces the access time from milliseconds to microseconds, accelerating analytics applications and enabling faster decision making
• Scalable caching appliances serve data in parallel, eliminating disk contention during read-intensive simulation and scenario modeling
• Efficient caching algorithms dynamically place frequently accessed data in cache reducing the administrative overhead to sustain peak load operations
• Throughput and access time achieved through caching eliminates the need to over-provision disk spindles
• Read intensive database workloads, with their random access patterns, can be dramatically accelerated with caching

The benefits of centralized storage caching directly apply to the financial analytics arena

• Faster decision making reduces risk and increases profits
• Simplifying real time application and analytics processing leaves more time to focus on unique trading models without worrying about underlying infrastructure
• Scalable caching architectures provide room to grow as new financial instruments and analysis methods develop

Related Links

• Gear6 Unveils Industry's First Terabyte-Scale Caching Appliances to Accelerate Data Intensive Applications