Challenges:

• Aging IT infrastructure
• Expensive, unreliable disaster recovery strategy
• Costly, unsatisfactory outsourced technical support
• Poorly designed, under-managed network

 

Solution: Trading Firm operators improve redundancy, reduce costs and eliminate server maintenance costs with deployment of cloud services using Juniper Elite Partner Synapse Networks.

 

Results: 

• Upgrade infrastructure with no impact during trading day
• Slash costs
• Simplify disaster recovery
• Push key systems to the cloud
• Provide long-desired redundancy

By the time the fund’s managers decided it was time to upgrade the firm’s infrastructure, their network lacked any built-in redundancy and were using Exchange 2003 on an older, out-of-warranty server for email.

The firm depends on direct access to business markets located around the world, requires business continuity in case of data loss and counts on email to confirm trades. The firm employs its own financial traders who rely on persistent network access to major financial markets. In short, when connectivity is disrupted money is potentially lost. Clearly it was time for a change.

Said one of the firm’s senior partners after the upgrade: “It’s much more important than the dollar savings, we can’t be down; email and connectivity are mission critical. Everything we care about in a big way is in the cloud, so we don’t need people in here managing servers. Most importantly, we know that it works.”

Synapse pinpointed four main areas where improvements could be made: switch infrastructure, email, ISP consolidation, and business continuity. Synapse connected the firm’s workstations to gigabit switches for the first time, and built in hardware redundancy.

By the time all was said and done, a near total equipment replacement had taken place, exchanging legacy equipment with new Juniper switches and Palo Alto Next Gen firewalls to conntect to multiple WAN circuits for failover. Core switches were replaced with a pair of Juniper EX4200-48T switches in a virtual chassis configuration for redundancy and legacy firewalls were replaced with a pair of Palo Alto 3020’s units in a high availability configuration.

Synapse successfully migrated all existing mailboxes to Exchange Online with no business interruption. The firm now enjoys 100GB mailboxes, comprehensive email archiving and legal hold features, effective spam and malware protection and access to the latest versions of Microsoft Office at no additional cost.

Disaster recovery was migrated from an expensive data center location to a much more cost effective and reliable private virtual cloud hosted by Microsoft Azure. Files and databases are replicated in real time and in the event of a disaster users simply connect via VPN tunnel to Azure and they seamlessly continue working.

ISP consolidation cut the monthly cost of $10,000 for connectivity by half, delivering fast, reliable Internet connections, a key component of day to day operations at the firm. Synapse Networks was able to eliminate expensive, slow T1 circuits and deliver 1000Mbps fiber to significantly increase network access and response times.

Let Synapse Networks make IT work for you!