HPE Superdome X and SQL Server In-Memory OLTP Powers Online Financial Services

It’s one thing to quote performance numbers and availability measures, and quite another to see how these statistics translate into real-world implementations.

SBI Liquidity Market is one company that has used the combination of the HPE Superdome X and SQL Server to upgrade and modernize its enterprise database infrastructure, positioning the company to be more competitive in a global market. SBI Liquidity Market, an online financial foreign exchange service based in Tokyo, needed to improve the performance and availability of its online transaction system. Founded in 2008, the company has grown to handle about $4.2 trillion dollars per year with more than 620,000 accounts. To put that in perspective, that volume is five times the annual Japanese national budget.

SBI Liquidity Market started out on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005, a combo capable of handling its average workload of 35,000 transactions per second. However, as the business continued to grow, SBI Liquidity Market knew that its database system would need to be upgraded to handle an ever-increasing volume of transactions from an expansion into the global marketplace. At the same time, the company needed to continue to provide its users with near-real-time responsiveness. Summing up the situation, Tatsuo Shigemitsu, CEO of SBI Liquidity Market, said, “FX trading is expected to grow significantly in the future in Asia. When that happens, the number of transactions will increase by up to 30 to 40 times, as well.”

In addition to increasing performance SBI Liquidity also needed to reduce extremely expensive system downtime.

To handle these requirements, SBI Liquidity Market decided to upgrade its enterprise database infrastructure to the HPE Superdome X and SQL Server 2014. As part of the upgrade, SBI Liquidity Market consolidated three systems into one scale-up environment using the HPE Superdome X and 3PAR StoreServ7440 storage.

To increase its application performance and scalability, the company decided to implement SQL Server’s high-performance In-Memory OLTP feature.  Financial trading systems like SBI Liquidity Market need to be able to process thousands of inserts, updates and deletes very rapidly, and traditional relational databases generate locks and latches for these types of operations—increasing latency and reducing performance. SQL Server’s In-Memory OLTP’s new optimistic concurrency control engine uses a lock-free latch-free design that would virtually eliminate the waits found in traditional relational database engines. Also on the company’s agenda is the adoption of AlwaysOn Availability Groups and the in-memory columnstore index for high availability and data warehousing.

SBI Liquidity Market shows that the HPE Superdome X and SQL Server provides extreme scalability, as well as improved availability and cost savings. SBI Liquidity Market said it expects a 16% performance increase in SQL Server consolidation and 60% less downtime.

“Our growth strategy includes an expansion overseas, and our current infrastructure is not able to support it,” said Tatsuo Shigemitsu. “With Superdome X, we get the performance and scalability we need to grow--and the peace of mind that comes from a resilient, available platform. ”

You can learn more about SBI Liquidity Market’s implementation of the HPE Superdome X and SQL Server at SBI Liquidity Market.

HPE and Microsoft are the underwriters of this article.