Enhanced Data Security and High Availability

• Faster, richer queries
• Better reporting services
• Enhanced data security and high availability

Situation

The India Infoline (IIFL) group, comprising the holding company, India Infoline Limited and its subsidiaries, is one of the leading players in the Indian financial services space. IIFL offers advice and execution platform for the entire range of financial services covering products ranging from equities and derivatives, commodities, wealth management, asset management, insurance, fixed deposits, loans, investment banking, Government of India bonds and other small savings instruments.

IIFL launched operations in 1995. It was awarded the ‘Best Broker, India’ by FinanceAsia, and the ‘Best Equity Broker of the Year, 2010-11’ by Bloomberg UTV.

The group caters to a customer base of about a million customers, over a variety of mediums viz. online, over the phone and at branches. A network of over 2,500 business locations spread over more than 500 cities and towns across India facilitates the smooth acquisition and servicing of this large customer base.

For IIFL, data is the backbone of all applications. “In 2007, we had only 2TB (terabytes)of data,” says Utkarsh Prajapati, Architect, IIFL. “Now, this has grown to 14TB, an increase of over 700percent. While continued data growth is not surprising in general, it made us recognize that our current infrastructure was not able to handle this growth.”

Processing more than 1.5 milliontransactions a day and handling 14TB of data, was not only a strain on the business, it also brought a number of challenges; the most important being the handling and storage of this data.

The key challenges included handling the large volumes of data during peak hours,and maintaining efficient transaction turnaround times without increasing storage exponentially.

As the existing infrastructure neared capacity, system performance also slowed. To maintain its leading position in a very competitive market, IIFL realized that it needed a solution that would provide enterprise-grade scalability and reduce the need for database maintenance.

Solution

To resolve the current challenges, IIFL decided to implement a Microsoft solution for its critical transaction processing, data warehousing, and business intelligence needs. The solution includes Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS). “We needed a system that could enhance performance and scalability as well as provide the business with capacity for growth and strong reliability,” says Sankarson Banerjee, Chief information Officer, India Infoline.

“SQL Server 2008 not only provided overwhelming processing capabilities but also met our needs for high availability, self-service reporting, and enhanced analysis capabilities,” he adds.

With the increase in the number of transactions at IIFL, the pressure on the database for processing these had increased considerably. Also there was an increased need to secure this data. With SQL Server 2008 this problem too was resolved.

Built-in Data Compression and Backup Compression enabled IIFL to manage ever-increasing amounts of data. This in turn reduced data storage costs, enhanced query performance and helped to ensure optimal performance of mission-critical applications.

According to Aditya Sisodia, Architect, IIFL, “SQL Server 2008 provided us with cutting edge tools to create, analyze and model, share and manage business intelligence data in a secure and streamlined way. The storage capacity was increased and we could accept more information. The solution not only enabled us to store data more effectively, but also reduced the storage requirements for data. Today, nearly 14TB of data is running on SQL Server 2008.”

IIFL also saw expressed interest in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, which gives employees more self-service analysis tools so they can easily create reports and share them across the company. It provided a complete, server-based platform designed to support a wide variety of reporting needs enabling IIFL to deliver relevant information wherever needed.

IIFL is taking advantage of the many enhancements of SQL Server 2008.

It enables it to maintain sub-second response time, which is a very critical requirement in its environment. Considering that IIFL is using SQL Server 2008 within its transaction cycle, this is a big advantage.

Replication and Data Transformation using SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (SSIS)is also utilized by IIFL. Hundreds of transactions are being replicated every second, and hundreds of thousands of rows are imported and exported into different formats every day.

IIFL deployed SQL Server 2008 in 2010. “Our team is absolutely confident in the availability and security of the new database technology,” says Utkarsh. “We now have a cost-effective and agile environment that provides us the capacity for growth and strong reliability. Overall, it increases capacity and performance.”

Benefits

IIFL’s decision to implement SQL Server is yielding several benefits, including strong performance and scalability, solid reliability, ease of administration, rich reporting and analysis tools, and low total costs. It can now safely manage the rapidly growing number of transactions as the new data management platform can scale to meet the demands very well. “The architecture has enabled us to store large volumes of transactional data more effectively, with reduced the storage capacity. Today, we have 14 terabytes of data on SQL Server 2008 and growing every second,”says Sankarson Banerjee, Chief information Officer, India Infoline.

Faster, Richer Queries

With the implementation of SQL Server 2008, IIFL anticipates enhanced query performance. Financial advisors are able to run queries effectively due to the availability of real time data. IIFL has achieved processing times that are much faster than before, which enables advisors to run many more queries throughout the day, thus enhancing productivity. The use of filtered indexes and sparse columns has, in particular helped improve performance and storage requirements, as many of our columns are naturally sparse.

“We were pleasantly surprised to find that compression actually improved query response times,” says Utkarsh. “We see asignificant reduction in query processing time using the Data Compression feature in SQL Server 2008. This was due to the smaller amounts of data being retrieved and saved to the database.”

Better Reporting Services

IIFL is using SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services for interactive reporting. SSRS supports more integrated, detailed, and faster reporting. It providesextensive value from the data warehouse, with approximately 4,000reports. Employees throughout the company make use of various report sets to better serve customers and enhance internal operations.

A typical report used to take 3-4 days to develop, plus at least another 3 days to test and deploy. “Now, it doesn’t take 7days to create a new report,” says Sankarson. “Instead, we can do the same job in hours from requirement to live deployment, including a few iterations with users, which is a big cost saving.”

Enhanced Data Security and High Availability

Data security is a top priority for IIFL. It is leveraging the new SQL Server 2008 enhancements to help make data and resources easier to manage and provide added security features.

IIFL works in a non-stop business environment where downtime is not tolerable. “We work with critical data and our systems require 24/7 availability and performance,” says Sankarson. “Thanks to SQL Server 2008, we are rapidly approaching 99.99 percent availability.”

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