When Milliseconds Matter

Overview

Challenge

• Required a highly scalable, reliable storage solution to support real-time financial services across Europe.
• Needed a future-ready platform to accommodate unpredictable data growth.
• Preferred a flexible procurement model that would minimize upfront investments while enabling on-demand scalability.
• Needed to meet sustainability mandates to reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption.

Solution

• Used the EverFlex IaaS Consumption service to acquire seven VSP 5600 and two E1090 arrays across four data centers in Europe for production and pre–production services.
• Implemented two HCP 4-node clusters with two VSP E790 systems with 6PB of object storage.
• Extended the SAN infrastructure with six Brocade X7 directors and various SAN switches, leveraging port-based EverFlex consumption.

Outcome

• Gained greater flexibility and scalability through a shared virtual storage pool.
• Achieved sustainability gains, including a +50% reduction in carbon emissions and 30% lower electricity consumption.
• Benefited from stable, reliable infrastructure, ensuring zero data loss and uninterrupted financial operations for 20 years and growing.

Challenge

Trading Without Downtime: A High-Stakes IT Transformation

In the high-stakes world of financial trading, even a second of downtime can disrupt markets, trigger millions of dollars in losses, and erode customer trust. For this European financial institution, which preferred not to divulge its name for competitive reasons, ensuring uncompromising uptime and lightning-fast data performance isn’t just a priority – it’s essential for survival.

This prominent European financial services company manages securities trading, clearing, settlement and financial information services. As data volumes surged and regulatory requirements tightened, the company’s legacy data storage infrastructure needed an upgrade. To maintain its reputation for stability, IT leaders sought a future-proof, high-performance data storage solution that could scale smoothly, deliver absolute reliability and meet strict corporate sustainability goals governing energy efficiency and carbon emissions.

The company also faced cost pressures, requiring a procurement model that could scale storage on demand while minimizing capital expenditures. Strict financial industry regulations limited their ability to store data in the cloud, reinforcing the need for a flexible, on-premises solution that would scale easily in response to shifting application demands.

Solution

Smarter Storage, Greater Agility, Seamless Compliance

To address these challenges, the organization utilized the Hitachi EverFlex Storage as a Service (STaaS)  consumption services  to acquire seven Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5600 and two E1090 systems for its core storage environment, deployed across four data center locations. The transition to the VSP 5600 platform was a natural lifecycle upgrade; the company had long relied on Hitachi Vantara storage equipment, and its existing environment was ready for modernization.   

The organization also implemented two Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) clusters as an S3-based object storage solution, backed by two Hitachi VSP E790 systems with 6 petabytes of capacity. This upgrade allowed them to offload massive amounts of SIEM log data while maintaining compliance with financial regulations. The HCP system provided a cold storage solution for the SIEM operations logs, while also supporting a robust data retention strategy that accommodates more than a century of archival data.  

To ensure smooth data flow, the company extended its Brocade SAN infrastructure, deploying six Brocade X7 directors and various SAN switches. The SAN infrastructure serves as the high-speed backbone connecting servers and storage arrays, ensuring low-latency data access and high availability. The EverFlex Storage as a Service model allows the company to pay only for the network ports it actively uses. “For us, it’s not about whether we buy hardware outright or use a consumption model. It’s about getting the best total cost of ownership for our needs,” said their head of storage.

At another site in Europe, where additional storage expansion was required, the company implemented a production solution with two Hitachi VSP 5600 systems and a pre-production system with two VSP E1090 systems. The organization also completed a SAN technology refresh by integrating four Brocade X7 directors.   

Hitachi assisted with a TCO analysis, demonstrating that consolidating storage on enterprise systems would be more cost-effective and energy efficient than a hyperconverged infrastructure, which resulted in  significantly higher power consumption and more carbon emissions. Sustainability goals have become increasingly important throughout the European financial services industry, and choosing an optimized storage solution with reduced energy requirements aligned with the company’s long-term strategy.

Outcome

Scalable, Sustainable, and Ready for the Future

Today, this leading stock exchange processes some of the highest transaction loads in Europe with zero data loss, uninterrupted service and enhanced sustainability. Proving that when milliseconds matter, the right technology makes all the difference.   

By modernizing its storage infrastructure, the organization achieved greater scalability, reliability and efficiency, while upholding strict regulatory standards. Having a virtual storage pool simplifies capacity planning, allowing different business units to scale storage dynamically without requiring constant reconfiguration. 

Leveraging a virtual storage pool also simplifies administration, since the storage team no longer needs to manage the relative needs of each business application. The company can consolidate its storage resources and flexibly allocate capacity across different business units without needing to manually adjust for each application’s demands. The company’s Oracle databases and VMware-based virtualization workloads smoothly transitioned to the new platform, ensuring high performance, availability and reliability. 

“When an issue does arise, we know we’ll get immediate attention,” says the senior product manager on their data storage team. “We trust Hitachi to respond quickly and ensure business continuity.”

The TCO analysis has become a critical factor in future procurement decisions. According to their IT product manager, the sustainability KPIs resulting from these calculations reinforced the decision to adopt a more energy efficient storage infrastructure, further aligning with corporate environmental goals. The analysis revealed that using the Hitachi storage environment instead of a hyperconverged infrastructure would reduce carbon emissions +50% and cut electricity consumption by over 30% . As these sustainability KPIs continue to shape IT strategy, Hitachi’s energy efficient storage solutions will help the organization align with the company’s aggressive regulatory and environmental initiatives.  

“Consolidating workloads on a centralized, efficient platform significantly reduces our energy footprint,” concludes their IT product manager. “This is a key step toward our goal of achieving carbon neutrality.”