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.

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
•
Initial solution to duplicate and partition the system drove up costs
•
Ensuring customer satisfaction remained high through system scale and account growth
Solution
•
Pivotal GemFire
Key Benefits
•
Provided lower latency under load than traditional databases
•
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

2. Pivotal is a registered trademark or trademark of Pivotal Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2014 Pivotal Software, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the USA. PVTL-CS-359-01/14
At Pivotal our mission is to enable customers to build a new class of applications, leveraging big and fast data, and do all of this with the power of cloud independence.
Uniting selected technology, people and programs from EMC and VMware, the following products and services are now part of Pivotal: Greenplum, Cloud Foundry, Spring,
GemFire and other products from the VMware vFabric Suite, Cetas and Pivotal Labs.
CASE STUDY SBI SECURITIES
Pivotal 3495 Deer Creek Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 pivotal.io
with NRI Financial Solutions and Hitachi, Ltd. SBI’s technology
team realized alternatives would not meet their needs and chose
Pivotal GemFire.
SOLUTION
Building an In-Memory, Distributed Data Grid with
Pivotal GemFire
As NRI, the primary system integrator and application developer,
and Hitachi, Ltd. began to define the system requirements, they
looked at in-memory systems and distributed cache solutions
– the only two architectures and approaches they could see
working for SBI. Then, they began an evaluation and test phase
to prove the performance of several solutions. First they tried
a competitor’s product, and while they saw some performance
gains, they also saw limitations with scale-out configurations.
Additionally, they couldn’t port their existing app because there
was no API compatibility. As they tested Pivotal GemFire, the
evaluation team realized it outperformed the other systems and
could scale out. While the existing application would still need
to be transformed, they saw how GemFire would provide higher
performance at a lower cost.
Pivotal’s engineering team worked together with both NRI and
Hitachi, Ltd. on a weekly basis from the beginning of the build
out to the production deployment. As the system went live in
January 2011, 150 servers were deployed – almost three times
fewer servers than the prior 400 server system. They also were
able to reduce their data center footprint by a factor of five, and
a post-project evaluation by SBI showed that cost reduction goals
were achieved. In addition, the system now handles transactions at
twice the volume as before with reference latency that is 20 times
faster (.05 seconds vs. 1 second) and execution throughput that is
three to four times faster.
BUSINESS BENEFITS
Provide Lower Latency under Load than Traditional
Databases
As an in-memory, distributed data platform, Pivotal GemFire
can act as a primary data store or cache existing databases and
mainframes to dramatically increase all types of data processing
speed through parallelism. With a shared-nothing architecture, SBI
saw firsthand how GemFire makes use of CPU, memory, network,
and disk to provide extremely low latency as load increases.
Ito said, “When you look at how Pivotal GemFire distributes and
replicates data and add the dimension of memory being faster
than disk, you quickly realize why this model of data platform
outperforms traditional solutions. Disk won’t provide the speed
that memory can, and centralized data cannot beat the ability
of a distributed system to run in parallel. There is also a financial
incentive to running on commodity hardware.”
Reduced Costs, Complexity, and Risk
Pivotal GemFire often runs in a smaller footprint than other
solutions, as it did at SBI. Built in cluster and distribution
management reduces application development costs, and a
familiar Java HashMap API gives developers a familiar data access
mechanism. For operations, the cluster provides continuous
uptime with high availability, disaster recovery, and redundancy
built in – along with additional cluster management tools to
operate a grid of commodity hardware. GemFire also supports
hot deployments, rolling upgrades, multiple data models, and the
ability to run different versions of an application at the same time.
According to Ito, “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.”
Ability to Scale the Data Tier
“The bottom line is Pivotal GemFire shows a near-linear ability to
scale,” according to Ito. As nodes are added to GemFire’s cluster,
capacity is added – the scale of the system is elastic. It will balance
the use of resources across the network and intelligently manage
the data while reducing network round trips. Nodes can also be
added or removed without impact to application code. GemFire
is cloud-ready and proven to handle the hardest data problems in
the world, such as systems with over a billion daily requests.
CONCLUSION
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.
LEARN MORE
To learn more about our products, services and solutions, visit us
at pivotal.io.