Financial firm cuts outages with Brocade technology

BGC Partners improves management of storage area network using fibre channel host bus adapters

BGC is now using Brocade's networking solutions

BGC Partners, a global intermediary to the wholesale financial markets, has simplified its storage area network (SAN) management capabilities with Brocade’s networking technology.

The company recently standardised on Brocade 415 4Gb/s Fibre Channels to PCIe host bus adapters (HBAs), switching from its QLogic and Emulex HBAs.

BGC Partners’ previous HBAs were proving to be a weak link in the company’s network, affecting business applications and overall system performance, the company said.

The small form-factor pluggables (SFP) module that BGC Partners had been using with its HBA was not hot-swappable. Therefore, even if there was only an SFP module failure, the HBA itself had to be replaced, resulting in more downtime.

“The set-up with two different manufacturers was causing us headaches in terms of HBA failure – the cards that had been in for a while and the SFPs were failing,” explained Sean Winter, server storage analyst at BGC.

He said there were also issues around the solutions’ management of the environments.

“QLogic’s management wasn’t brilliant, Emulex’s was better with the HP Anywhere tool but that only got you so far,” said Winter. “We were looking for solutions to try to simplify both rollout and management of the environments.”

BGC Partners decided to bring in Brocade’s HBAs into a test environment. It worked with its server teams, both Solaris and Wintel, to see how they felt about them.

“We liked the fact that we could swap the SFPs because that was our primary reason for having to swap an HBA,” explained Winter.

He explained that because of the nature of the company's applications, it could not make changes during the day because it would cause trading systems to time out and effectively result in an outage to brokers and other staff. "It meant it was an out-of-hours task,” said Winter.

BGC Partners now suffers from fewer SFP and HBA failures and fewer outages. Winter says that implementation of the HBAs costs no more than the firm was previously spending on its QLogic and Emulex HBAs, and although the cost savings from the implementation are difficult to quantify, the diminished risk of outages will save the firm incurring lost revenue due to outages.

“If there is an outage to the system – no matter how long it is, a broker will switch to one of our competitors,” explained Winter.

“That means that we aren’t making as much money as we possibly could."