is a corporatized and de-mutualized entity that has a broad shareholder base. It includes two leading global exchanges, the Deutsche Bourse and the Singapore Exchange, as strategic partners. BSE provides an efficient and transparent market for trading in equity, debt instruments, derivatives, mutual funds. The scale at which BSE operates and grows continuously is a phenomenon in itself. The BSE is the world’s number one bourse in terms of listed members, with over 5,000 companies listed on it. It is the world’s fifth most-active exchange in terms of transactions. In total it commands market capitalization of $1.06 trillion (about Rs 58 lakh crore) as of May 15, 2012. It is the first exchange in India and only the second in the world to be ISO 9001:2000 certified. It is also the first exchange in the country and second in the world to receive Information Security Management System Standard BS 7799-2-2002 certification for its On-Line trading System (BOLT). That’s an impressive reputation, one that could be tarnished by an unreliable storage ecosystem. Storage subsystems have always been considered the most critical support platform for infrastructure running an organization with this scale, capacity and throughput. And at BSE, they were fast running out of storage capacity. “Moreover, there was also no single replication technology available to take care of the volume and update the disaster recovery site. We’ve been running different storage boxes working in silos. This added to our power consumption. This surely wasn’t conducive for the scale of enterprise growth we were witnessing,” recalls Tavadia.
An unreliable storage environment could
endanger the reputation that the BSE has built over 137 years. Storage subsystems have always been considered a critical platform for running an organization with this scale, capacity and throughput.
The stock exchange’s IT team took stock of the storage subsystems’ current requirements and mapped it to the rate at which the organization was scaling up. Estimating year-on-year growth, the team sized up a storage solution for a three-year horizon. “Our needs were pretty clear. We were looking for innovative technology from the market leaders that offered specialized replication techniques. Considering the kind of IT ecosystem we ran, we were leaning towards solutions that were inherently vendor agnostic. Quite naturally, we wanted all of this with crystal clear price-performance benefits,” points out Tavadia.
CONSOLIDATING GOOD The existing storage subsystem at BSE was midrange and came from multiple vendors. If BSE’s IT team wanted to ensure that they could support the exchange’s growth, its first step was to consolidate the enterprise’s storage platform. The consolidation required that the storage environment would be scalable in terms of sheer capacity because it was to host a number of real-time applications that required the highest level of availability and performance. Towards that end EMC proposed its flagship storage offering, the Symmetrix. “Since we were dealing with EMC for the first time, we deliberated on every aspect of the solution, both from technical as well as business standpoints. The solution was analyzed from a risk-assessment and mitigation perspective, along with well-defined fallback measures and liabilities,” says Tavadia. “It turned out to be a good learning exercise as we also compared competitive products and gained good insight into prevailing technological advancements.” Tavadia’s team eventually chose to deploy Symmetrix DMX4 solutions at its production and DR datacenters with NAS functionality for shared storage. The solutions were implemented with about a 100 TB of raw capacity at each site, with storage-based replication duly configured. This was deployed with enough flexibility to support the BSE application topology. By design, most of the BSE’s mission-critical applications were hosted at the production datacenter with replication to the DR Symmetrix solution. A few applications were also hosted at the DR site that replicated the production datacenter Symmetrix solution. This ensured that resources at both the sites were used optimally. The solution also offers the organization advanced features for performance and optimization, including dynamic cache partitioning, optimizer and priority controls. The on-board NAS functionality offers private shared storage to each department for common documents and also hosts a public shared storage