Jhaveri Securities becomes more agile with Nutanix Cloud

The leading financial services broker deploys applications 60% faster and improves the performance of applications for greater productivity.

Overview

Jhaveri Securities is a major stock broking house in Gujarat. Continued investments in data-center hardware were becoming less effective owing to challenges with increasing power consumption, maintaining availability and managing multiple suppliers. The company engaged with Nutanix and deployed Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, migrating workloads to a three-node cluster, which has since expanded and been boosted with all-flash storage. As a result of the migration, Jhaveri Securities has increased agility with quicker deployments. Employees are also working more efficiently with better performing applications thanks to better database query speeds, and power consumption has been reduced.

Challenge

Jhaveri Securities is one of the largest stock broking houses in Gujarat, India. Launched in 1992, the company serves approximately 1 million customers and plays a pivotal role in the development of primary and secondary stock markets across the Gujarat state.

The company is thriving thanks to investments in IT and people. Using the latest software, Jhaveri Securities financial experts are helping customers maximize the value of their portfolios. Yet there came a point when continued outlays in traditional server hardware were showing diminishing returns, and it was time for the organization to rethink its technology strategy.

The problem was Jhaveri Securities had built up a large physical infrastructure, distributed across four racks. The hardware, which supported 20-plus critical business applications as well as test environments, was inflexible and difficult to manage. Power consumption was high as were the costs of maintaining an uninterruptible power supply. What’s more, there was a growing risk of downtime because none of the servers were configured for high availability, and support was time-consuming since Jhaveri Securities relied on help from multiple vendors.

Solution

Moving the infrastructure to the public cloud wasn’t an option. Jhaveri Securities wanted to keep IT firmly under its control. Still, the business looked to move to a cloud-like virtualized model for IT and a system that would increase agility, consolidate hardware and simplify maintenance.

The company engaged with Nutanix, which proposed the Nutanix Cloud Platform, running the AHV hypervisor and built around a three-node hybrid cluster. Besides compute, the Nutanix solution included storage with de-duplication, compression and intelligent tiering with data locality for maximum performance.

After deploying the three-node cluster in 2019 with the support of Nutanix Partner 7Array Solutions, Jhaveri Securities then doubled the memory capacity in 2020. Subsequently, it upgraded the storage capacity again in 2021, eventually deploying an all-flash second cluster in 2022 for more resilience. Today, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is supporting all business-critical applications including management and file servers. The same platform is also running web, mail, call recording servers as well as a networking management and endpoint security systems.

Customer Outcome

Increases agility with 60% faster deployments

Since moving to the Nutanix Cloud Platform, Jhaveri Securities has transformed the speed at which it can innovate and get latest software into the hands of employees. Now, the company can deploy applications 60 percent faster, rolling out new capabilities quicker than ever before.

“Business models are changing quickly, and new business models are appearing through digitalisation. With Nutanix, we are able to deploy and execute ideas into reality very quickly.

Nutanix reduces complexity and makes operation easy. No one could expect COVID19 lock down in India to happen overnight but because of Nutanix, we were able to manage servers remotely & perform seamless operation without downtime and latency,” said Vipul Shah, executive vice president of Jhaveri Securities.

Powers better performance by tripling database query speeds

Employees are working more efficiently because of an improvement in the performance of software programs following the switch to Nutanix. With all-flash storage as part of the platform, the Jhaveri Securities IT team has seen a three times improvement in distributed database queries, which in turn has delivered a significant uptick in the responsiveness of business applications.

Reduces power consumption

The company has also called a halt to server sprawl and underutilized machines taking up space and consuming additional power. With the Nutanix Cloud Platform, it can run up to 40 virtual machines on each cluster in high availability mode, while reducing the CPU and memory utilization per virtual machine by 30 percent, lowering power use. 

Simplifies IT management

The IT team can manage the entire platform through a single Nutanix Prism management console, monitoring performance and security and making changes on the fly for optimization. Team members are also learning new skills in scaling infrastructure rather than performing routine management.

Using Prism, the IT team has visibility down to port traffic and can monitor cluster health to help avoid downtime. Plus, Prism provides critical alerts, and a feature called Pulse shares diagnostic data with Nutanix Support when needed for rapid troubleshooting.

Ensures zero downtime

Downtime is zero with upgrades to hardware no longer disrupting operations. In addition, even if issues strike, the business can fall back on real-time snapshots of data, deploying those snapshots in a single click. Plus by eliminating redundant data thanks to a deduplication ratio of almost 2:1, recovery times are faster, with IT administrators able to manage disaster recovery processes remotely.

Better work-life balance for IT admins

The remote management capabilities as well as the high availability of the cloud platform is helping the IT team strike a better work/life balance. They can enjoy their free time more and no longer spend weekends wrestling with hardware issues in the data center. “We can manage Nutanix with minimal human effort,” says Vipul Shah, Executive Vice President, Jhaveri Securities.

Partner

7Array Solutions applied its systems integration and networking expertise to help Jhaveri Securities cost effectively migrate to Nutanix, while ensuring the Nutanix Cloud Platform delivered excellent performance.