Connecting Users to Stock Markets

Connecting Users to Stock Markets

A Gujarat-based Shares and Finance company needed least downtimes, capacity to handle large spurts of customer data and space consolidation. Read on to see how the company achieved it

Vishnu Anand

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Marwadi Shares and Finance Ltd (MSFL) is a Gujarat-based financial service group dealing in equities, commodities broking, and portfolio mgmt services. Incorporated in 1992, MSFL became a member of the NSE within the first 4 yrs of operations, and in the last 15 yrs the company has incorporated a network of more than 47 branches and 400 odd channel partners across India, with 1.35 lakh dedicated investors, most of whom, according to MSFL are ‘serious and long-term partners.’ As of now, the company is an active member at BSE, MCEX, NCDEX, NSDL, and CSDL.
MSFL has in place for its investor base, an online trading system, which is most active during the first 10 min of the stock exchanges’ opening bell and this is when thousands of trades are initiated. The load is not so much during the rest of the day, but on an average, around 100 trades are initiated by the system every day through the working hours of the stock exchanges. The sum total of all transactions in a day run into hundreds of crores—all of this managed by the online trading system, which cannot afford to have the least of downtimes. For the WAN backbone, MSFL has set up leased line connectivity to the individual stock exchanges backed by VSAT for redundancy and LAN connections. MSPL were deployed using the Cisco Gigabyte Network switches along with Check Point for a strong firewall ported on Nokia hardware.

For their server and storage solutions, HP is the solution partner, since this was a large scale deployment for MSFL. The senior mgmt admits that it went strictly by market statistics of who had more BFSI customers. A combination of SAN EVA 4000 along with HP’s BladeSystem c7000 was chosen after being promised scalability, cost effectiveness, and the ability to control hundreds to thousands of users who can be supported with consistently high performance and excellent operating efficiency.

Prior to this deployment, MSFL hosted different servers across different boxes, which directly translated to massive space requirements. Also, data on the existing network was unmanaged, and there was a need to handle huge volume of online trading transactions per second, where the database needed to have a very high read/write speed, with minimum downtime. Besides EVA SAN 4000, the company also deployed 6 HP Proliant Servers, Tape Drive for backup, app level failover protection, and 24/7 care and support.

Another integral part of the MSFL solution has been the ODIN app from FT India, 80% of their trading platform has been running on this multi-exchange, multi-segment front office securities trading platform for equities, derivatives, and commodities markets. Syncing up the ODIN app to the new deployment has brought down the downtime by more than 80%. Seeing these significant results, MSFL is currently using ODIN for all its trading activities, and since the initial investment, it has subsequently gone for an additional Blade server.

MSFL’s learning on online trading systems
The four major parameters for a successful online trading system depends on:
3 The way you are connected to the stock exchanges (WAN)
3 The way your servers are connected to your desktops (LAN)
3 The computing speed of the servers
3 The read/write speed on the storage disk where the database is stored.
"Post the deployment, there was a noticeable difference in the downtime by more than 75-80%, besides helping in the manageability and space optimization, uptime, and most importantly, power consumption was brought down by 5-7%, directly translating to more efficient functioning of the business."
MSFL to PCQuest

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