Customer Loyalty Rings High

To cater to its clients’ mind-boggling requirements, JM Financial Services needed to scale its infrastructure and eliminate frequent system downtime. A look at how the company achieved its objective By Jasmine Desai

Delivering high-level of customer satisfaction is becoming a necessity for every organization, and JM Financial Services Pvt Ltd (JMFS), one of the largest brokerage firms in India, was no exception. JMFS offers comprehensive investment advisory and management services to institutions, banks, corporates, high net-worth individuals and retail clients. Founded in 1998, JMFS today has its footprint in 440 locations in 140 cities in India.

The big challenge

To provide effective financial solutions and sustain a business model that caters to their clients’ varied requirements, JMFS has to operate complex trading systems, connect to multiple stock exchanges, and provide real-time trading information to clients. The company required a scalable infrastructure that would meet the high-availability demands of their clients. The challenge looming large in its face, was to eliminate system downtime and ensure the high availability of their trading systems to secure continued customer loyalty. Server consolidation came as the solution.

Explains Titus Gunaseelan, Head, Information Technology, JMFS, “Our previous set-ups consisted of standalone legacy servers, and the challenge of maintaining multiple platforms was affecting our efficiency. To achieve resource optimization, a reduced server footprint and high availability, we needed to consolidate our server infrastructure on a robust platform.” Before finalizing on Dell platform, JMFS had a check list of three main criteria: The ability to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of its IT and business challenges; the ability to create an appropriate solution based on their requirements and challenges; and long-term support commitment.

Dell was not the only choice. Even HP was under consideration as they were the incumbent vendor. JMFS replaced their legacy servers with Dell PowerEdge R610 and R710 servers with Intel Xeon processors, virtualized with VMware vSphere 4 server software, and immediately reduced their server footprint by almost 88 percent. “Previously we had a low server utilization of around 10 percent. Through server consolidation we replaced almost 50 physical servers with 6 physical servers, and we are now running close to 70 virtual machines on these Dell servers,” confirms Gunaseelan. In addition to virtualizing their data center, JMFS also deployed a Dell EqualLogic PS6000XV storage area network (SAN) solution to provide maximum uptime for their critical applications. The SAN supports a clustered environment of servers at JMFS and provides a highly scalable storage capacity that can expand on demand, which is very crucial to the company’s dynamic and rapidly changing business environment.

The implementation of the solution was carried over a period of a month and was completed in November 2012. Dell did the overall execution from an end-to-end perspective. This involved the creation of a well-documented Statement Of Work (SOW) process which was signed off with the JFMS IT team prior to project execution. This was followed up with the actual implementation which was carried out by Dell’s services teams.

Big on benefits

JMFS immediately started reaping benefits from the implementation which are spread across the organization. Speaking on plethora of benefits Gunaseelan says, “The benefits of virtualizing your data center extend beyond the immediate savings of reducing your hardware footprint. You also realize benefits such as easy hardware reuse and redeployment, server configuration in minutes, and streamlined provisioning and maintenance.” The upshot of this is that you ease the burden on your staff so they have time to focus on other things such as supporting users and meeting service-level agreements (SLAs). JMFS has minimized downtime and user disruption through high availability infrastructure and mission-critical applications which now operate 24×7. This has a positive flow-over effect to the customers of JMFS, who now have guaranteed access to real-time trading data, enabling them to make trading decisions ahead of the competition. In this way the solution is supporting the company’s initiatives to secure long term customer loyalty.

Through the ease and simplicity of maintaining the virtualized environment, JMFS has reduced IT maintenance resources by almost 15 percent. As data backup and recovery process are automated within the Dell EqualLogic solution, the IT team at JMFS is now able to allocate the time previously spent on manual database restorations to projects that include exploring an organization-wide virtual desktop infrastructure deployment. Gunaseelan explains, “The automatic failover and snapshotting features of the Dell EqualLogic solution have meant that our IT team has readjusted their focus onto value-added projects. The team has become more proactive in thinking about the company’s future IT needs.” Scalability, performance and better infrastructure utilization were the top three challenges the company wanted to overcome, which they were able to post-implementation.

Every implementation has its highlight. Commenting on the most significant aspect of the implementation Gunaseelan says, “The entire process has been a unique experience. The fact that we got what we started out to achieve with this implementation is the most significant aspect we can think of.” As of now, the organization has not made any concrete plan of further leveraging the implementation and choose to go with the flow. However, they can definitely scale up or down and leverage this implementation as per their needs in the future.

jasmine.desai@expressindia.com