BAILLIE GIFFORD Investment management firm speeds processing and enables continuous availability with EMC

OVERVIEW

Baillie Gifford is an investment management firm which prides itself on looking after its clients’ interests above anything else. That means looking for investment opportunities which will benefit its clients’ portfolios and meet clients’ needs at all hours of the day.

The firm’s fund managers need to know the status of their clients’ portfolios and need the ability to trade accurately and efficiently when they have made their investment decisions. Therefore, Baillie Gifford needed a storage solution with rock solid stability ESSENTIALS and extremely fast performance. The company chose the EMC® XtremIO™ scale-out Business Challenges all-flash array for its speed, reliability, and resilience. • Portfolio position processing SPEED system took up to 90 minutes Baillie Gifford processes its portfolio positions overnight and several times per day in several times per day, order to reflect new orders, cash movements, price changes, and so on. This is a impacting user productivity major compute exercise that, even with the use of leading edge technologies, could • Company needed to provide take up to 90 minutes. The process is intrusive and locks up other parts of the system continuity and resiliency to its which valuations are changing, so speed is important. infrastructure Since deploying XtremIO, portfolio position processing time has been reduced Solutions dramatically—to around 30 minutes—enabling the process to be performed more often • EMC XtremIO and with less impact on other users. • EMC VPLEX Metro

• EMC ViPR RELIABILITY Using XtremIO coupled with EMC VPLEX® Metro continuous mobility and availability, • EMC RecoverPoint Baillie Gifford has driven its infrastructure towards one which delivers continuous and Results consistently high-performance availability. Applications and services can now be • Reduced time to process seamlessly transitioned between the company’s two sites—the Edinburgh portfolio positions headquarters and the new, purpose-built business continuity site—with no downtime. dramatically—down to 30 minutes—reducing impact on In the event of a catastrophic loss of a site, services continue to operate from the users surviving location. As part of the deployment, the technical teams have engineered the solution to ensure that individual component failures do not result in a loss of • Provided continuous availability service or performance degradation. and resiliency • Freed up data center space for RESILIENCE other use and reduced power Using VPLEX technology, Baillie Gifford has stretched its storage infrastructure over and cooling costs two data center sites in an active-active configuration, providing tremendous • Automated the process of resilience and recovery capabilities. The company’s business continuity site houses a providing database copies to set of EMC SAN and XtremIO equipment that is almost identical to that of the developers headquarters site.

CUSTOMER PROFILE The company leverages efficiencies and drives performance improvements by balancing compute workloads across the two sites while still maintaining diverse, realtime of its mission-critical services.

AGILITY AND EFFICIENCY Baillie Gifford develops many of its mission-critical applications itself. As a result, the company has a large development footprint, particularly across its database estate. To progress all of its projects, the company needs to run approximately 60 development and test databases, each of them around 2.5 TB.

Utilizing XtremIO snapshots and compression, Baillie Gifford now only uses the footprint of about three databases—a massive savings which enables the company to easily scale its project work as the firm grows.

Baillie Gifford also reduced its data center footprint from multiple racks of traditional storage to a single rack of XtremIO. This reduction enabled the company to leverage extensive power and cooling savings and to free up data center space for other purposes. With the enterprise-wide success of XtremIO, Baillie Gifford has decided to adopt an all-flash data center storage topology.

CONTINGENCY In addition to using VPLEX to increase resiliency between its two data centers, Baillie Gifford has also deployed EMC RecoverPoint® and its MetroPoint™ features for continuous data protection (CDP) to cover both legs of the VPLEX Metro environment.

The CDP and journaling volumes reside on the latest EMC VNX® unified storage array (VNX2), providing physically separate arrays to deliver and ensure contingency to match the requirements of the business.

"We've made life simpler for our DBAs because XtremIO does most of the heavy lifting. We’re moving towards delivering on- demand resources for the development community."

Collin Lennox Head of Technology and Service Delivery at Baillie Gifford

ON DEMAND RESOURCES Previously, Baillie Gifford’s database administrator (DBA) team performed numerous RMAN and restores to deploy database copies to developers. Now the company uses EMC ViPR® to automate much of that process. As a result, DBA productivity has improved.

"We've made life simpler for our DBAs because XtremIO does most of the heavy lifting," says Colin Lennox, Head of Technology and Service Delivery at Baillie Gifford. "We’re moving towards delivering on-demand resources for the development community."

To reach that goal, Baillie Gifford began using XtremIO snapshots. And with ViPR automation, the company plans to provide its DBAs with self-service, enabling them to make their own database copies. This capability will free up technical staff to focus on value-added services.

Company Overview Baillie Gifford has deployed ViPR to provide ‘single pane of glass’ management for all Baillie Gifford is one of the UK’s elements of the storage infrastructure. ViPR removes the complexity of deploying leading investment managers based storage to the environment and ensures a fully consistent approach to storage in Edinburgh with over £114 billion administration. EMC ViPR SRM enables end-to-end analytic reporting and monitoring under management and advice in for the full storage and VMware® environment. equity and bond portfolios for clients in the UK and throughout the world A TRUSTED TECHNOLOGY PARTNER (as at 31 December 2014). Baillie Gifford has viewed EMC as a trusted technology partner for many years now, and the introduction of XtremIO and VPLEX, coupled with ViPR, has further cemented that relationship. The company will continue to invest in its technology platform in order to deliver the best service it can to its clients.

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EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, MetroPoint, RecoverPoint, ViPR, VNX, VPLEX, and XtremIO are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc., in the United States and other jurisdictions. © Copyright 2015 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 07/15 Customer Profile H14324

EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.