Religare Securities Limited - An IBM Case Study

Religare Securities Limited, a subsidiary of Religare Enterprises Limited, is a leading equity and securities firm in India. The company currently handles sizeable volumes traded on NSE and holds a significant share of online trading and investments. The major activities and offerings of the company include Equity Broking, Depository Participant Services, Portfolio Management Services, International Advisory Fund Management Services, Institutional Broking and Research Services. To broaden the gamut of services offered to its investors, the company offers an online investment portal armed with a host of revolutionary features.

Religare Securities Limited maintains an in-house data center where, as the trading volume grew in 2008, server sprawl and inadequate power became issues. Server sprawl was a result of the increased user load and the need for additional applications. The deployment time needed for theses additions was too lengthy. Religare was also experiencing increased cooling costs for the new servers which were becoming more difficult to handle.

The IBM solution for Religare Securities Limited included three IBM BladeCenter H Chassis and ten IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers. The BladeCenters are running VMware and Microsoft Windows. The company is running the FT-Odin application and the entire online trading business on these blades which represents about 60% of the business. The scale-out applications are consolidated on IBM blade Servers powered by Low voltage Intel harpertown processors.

IBM BladeCenter, with Intel Xeon processors, provide remarkable energy efficiency with a comprehensive portfolio of energy management tools. This implementation, including IBM System x3950 M2, IBM System x running VMware, and IBM System x running Windows is designed to reduce operational costs.

The IBM System x3950 M2 supports NUMA and integrates well with Microsoft SQL 2005, which also runs NUMA architecture. This solution provides significant savings in operating system and SQL licensing costs compared to one server for each database solution.

This solution demonstrated that HP Itanium cannot scale the Intel Xeon CPUs to these limits. IBM System x 3950 M2 gave a phenomenal Price/Performance advantages over competition.

Religare Securities Limited realized significant benefits from the IBM solution which included:

-- A reduction in power, cooling and space expenses by 50%.

-- A consolidated environment that provides flexibility of application deployment and ease of management.

-- The client is able to use a scale out approach by inserting BladeCenter Servers in the BladeCenter Chassis whenever needed. This has decreased deployment time, keeping IT up and running in support of the business.