Shah Investor's Home Enhances Operations With VMware Virtualisation

Shah Investor’s Home, a Gujarat-based stock broking, wealth management and depository services provider to investors, has deployed VMware’s virtualisation platform to cost-effectively enhance availability and redundancy of business-critical systems, including an ODIN (Open Dealer Integrated Network) trading and risk management platform.

By leveraging the VMware virtualisation platform, Shah Investor’s Home has been able to optimise its existing servers by increasing average CPU utilisation from the current level of 25-40 percent to 60 percent, while achieving a server consolidation ratio of 3:1. Further, it has also helped the company switch memory and CPU capacity to support database processing once a trading day is over, while reducing power and cooling costs by 20 percent. The combination of virtualisation running on servers with multi-core processors has improved performance by 30-40 percent as per company claims.

Jinal Shah, Manager, Information Technology, Shah Investor’s Home, said, “VMware has ensured that applications such as the ODIN trading and risk management platform meet our standards of performance and availability. If we cannot complete trades, we lose clients and revenue. Deploying VMware has given our senior management team peace of mind that we can continue to operate in almost any circumstances.”

VMware virtualisation has enabled Shah Investor’s Home to consolidate and virtualise the physical servers running critical business applications. The solution also allows Shah Investor’s Home to run virtual servers on alternative physical hosts in the event of a hardware problem and allocate computing resources to applications as required. They have created a clone trading application that can immediately switch on if anything happens to the primary system.

Headquartered in Gujarat, Shah Investor’s Home has around 70 employees and is now running 10 virtual machines on three host Dell blade servers and one back-up machine supported by an EMC storage system with 2.1 TB capacity. The VMware platform at work includes VMware Infrastructure 3 with ESX 3.5, VMware VMotion, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), VMware High Availability (HA) and VMware vCenter Server.

In December 2008, Shah Investor’s Home decided to engage with Avnet Technology Solutions (India) and found that their core business applications, SQL database and Web servers operated very well when tested in a virtualised environment and decided to deploy VMware virtualisation over Citrix and Microsoft solutions. Avnet then helped in designing and deploying VMware Infrastructure that supports Shah Investor’s business-critical ODIN platform, which executes 30,000 to 40,000 trades on behalf of its clients through a computer-to-computer link with Indian stock exchanges.