Geojit BNP Paribas Deploys Brocade Switching Infrastructure

Geojit BNP Paribas, one of India’s leading financial services providers has deployed a new networking infrastructure supplied by Brocade at its Kochi headquarters. The new network provides the firm with more than 1,100 wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet access ports, more carrying power, and a low-latency core that is both scalable and resilient, providing a strong foundation for business expansion and new service offerings.

An affiliate of the one of the world’s largest financial groups, Geojit BNP Paribas pioneered on-line securities trading in India. Today, it is the country’s third largest retail stockbroker with more than 633,000 clients, Rs 11,027 crore (USD2 billion) worth of assets under management and a national network of over 540 offices.

Since Geojit BNP Paribas first offered its Internet trading system in 2000, India’s major stock markets have grown enormously, fueled by the country’s economic growth and the government’s privatisation program. The Indian middle class has also developed a significant share-holding culture, with more than three million individual shareholders in the country – the world’s third largest retail investor base after the US and Japan.

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“The network is obviously the operational backbone of our business and after several years of strong growth, we were beginning to experience constraints in our existing infrastructure,” said A. Balakrishnan , CTO of Geojit BNP Paribas. “Brocade was able to offer us a very compelling value proposition with its campus and data center networking solutions. It provided a scalable foundation, with low-latency performance for our continued development of services delivered through Internet, mobile, call center and branch office channels.”

Geojit BNP Paribas selected Brocade’s BigIron RX-8 Ethernet switch, designed for non-stop operation, as the heart of its new network. The RX-8 provides up to 384 non-blocking Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) or 128 10-GbE ports in a compact chassis with 1.92 Tbps of total switching capacity. This high capacity and port-density enables Geojit BNP Paribas to connect all access switches directly to the network core, reducing it total cost-of-ownership and eliminating latency caused by having an aggregation layer.

Brocade 48-port FastIron Workgroup switches have been deployed to provide network access and power-over-Ethernet within Geojit BNP Paribas’ head office and call center while 48-port Brocade FastIron LS switches are used for server connectivity within the data center. Both these platforms provide wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet performance, with FastIron LS switches to the core upgradeable to 10-GbE.

“Geojit BNP Paribas has established itself as a leader among the thousands of stockbrokers operating in India,” said Rajesh Kaul, regional sales director for Brocade India. “With the implementation of the new Brocade switching infrastructure, it now has a superior networking foundation with which to drive quality-based competitive advantage and scale its operations while maintaining a low network management overhead.”