TECHNICAL WHITEPAPER Grid-Enabling and Virtualizing Mission-Critical Financial Services’ Applications AUGUST 2006 WWW.PLATFORM.COM 2 Grid-Enabling and Virtualizing Mission-Critical Financial Services Applications Table of Contents Executive Summary............................................................................................3 1. Solution Overview.........................................................................................4 2. Platform Symphony Architecture......................................................................4 3. Grid-Enabling Compute-Intensive Applications with Platform Symphony................5 3.1 High Availability of Symphony-Enabled Applications..........................................................................7 3.2 Performance and Scalability of Symphony-Enabled Applications..........................................................7 3.3 Platform Symphony Grid-Enablement Patterns for Service-Oriented Applications.....................................8 3.4 Platform Symphony for Grid-Enablement APIs....................................................................................9 3.5 Platform Symphony and Application Technology Interoperability..........................................................9 4. Grid Resource Orchestration in Platform Symphony.........................................12 4.1 Ownership and Policy-based Sharing of Resources...........................................................................14 4.2 Guaranteed Service Level Agreement.............................................................................................14 4.3 Platform EGO in Action.................................................................................................................14 5. Managing the Platform Symphony Grid.........................................................15 5.1 The Platform Management Console……………………………………………………………………........….15 5.2 Data Management........................................................................................………………........….15 5.3 Reliability and High Availability for System and Application Components………………....................….16 5.4 Monitoring, Dynamic Troubleshooting and Event Notification………………......................................…17 5.5 Pluggable Security Framework………………....................................................................................17 5.6 Service Workload Scheduling – Proportional Scheduling with or without Session Affinity.......................17 5.7 Service Deployment………………..................................................................................................17 5.8 Grid Node Management…………..................................................................................................17 6. Conclusion.................................................................................................18 3 Grid-Enabling and Virtualizing Mission-Critical Financial Services Applications Executive Summary Today’s financial services firms are under increasing pressure to grow revenue and market share amidst intense competition, regulations, and the growing need for enterprise risk management. At the same time customers are struggling to lower the total cost of ownership of resources, increase operating efficiency to be faster, more agile and adaptive to changing business demands. Critical applications like pricing, Value-at-Risk, stochastic modeling, and Monte Carlo simulations need to be executed in real time, requiring massive computational power, working with multiple applications, and faster application runtimes. Financial Services organizations have experienced dramatic growth over the last several years, with many forecasting much more growth to come. To take advantage of the market potential, FS firms need to have increased business agility and more complex business risk analysis. Front and middle office business units are looking at deploying virtualization solutions for many demanding applications like: • Credit, FX, and equities derivatives • Convertibles calculations, bond yields • Corporate derivative value risk management • Intra-day portfolio and credit risk • Financial engineering and model development • Portfolio analysis • FX options • Risk reporting & compliance • Derivatives credit exposure The computation engines for these applications are usually tightly coupled to the overall risk management system. As a result, all of these executable programs run on the same physical machine, which may also function as the database server. This leads to an infrastructure that is difficult to manage and an environment that cannot scale to keep pace with the ever-changing business demands. This monolithic architecture introduces high operational costs by: • Forcing financial application developers to move outside their area of expertise to develop distribution mechanisms and load balancing schemes for internal HPC solutions; • Duplicating HPC solutions across each line of business; and • Requiring each business technology team to fully staff in order to operate the HPC services and perform service maintenance, such as repairs and capacity planning, while tuning and upgrading systems. To solve these problems, banks are turning to resource virtualization solutions. Resource virtualization enables large-scale distributed computing where geographically dispersed computers can be shared dynamically between many applications to behave as a single shared computer. As enterprises evolve to be more agile and adaptive, and move to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the Platform technology extends the SOA-paradigm to compute resources and delivers Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI). With this technology, companies can balance the supply and demand of computing resources by providing users with a single, transparent, aggregated source of computing power. Ultimately, it provides the ability to lower the total cost of computing by providing on-demand, reliable and transparent access to available computer resources. This white paper provides an overview of Platform Symphony, covering the technical aspects of Symphony architecture, grid- enabling and managing applications with Platform Symphony. The target audience for this white paper are the IT managers and application architects in the Financial Services market. 4 Grid-Enabling and Virtualizing Mission-Critical Financial Services Applications 1. Solution Overview Platform Symphony, designed for the financial services market, is ideal for mission-critical risk management and compute intensive application services. Built on Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator™ (EGO), Symphony allows you to build, test, grid-enable, and manage application services on a highly fault-tolerant, shared, scaled-out infrastructure. Platform Symphony brings the following benefits to your business: • Launch new products faster, better manage your risks, and increase your revenue Designed to solve massively compute-intensive problems in record time, Symphony empowers you with faster results. On an average our customers have seen 80% speed-up in application run times. Faster results allow you to make faster decisions, be more competitive, and win more business. • Increase server utilization and infrastructure ROI Most server farms operate at less than 30% of their capacity, and most are over-provisioned for peak loads. Wasted capacity equates to wasted investment (datacenter costs, energy, real-estate, thermal issues, maintenance). With Platform Symphony, you can increase server and cluster utilization to up to 95%. • Easily grid-enable applications Tailored for grid-ready environments, the Symphony Developer Edition allows LOBs (Lines of Businesses) and application developers to build applications without involving IT, leading to faster time to build and deploy new applications on the grid and faster realization of revenue opportunity. • High Reliability IT organizations can leverage Platform Symphony’s resilient and fault-tolerant architecture to provide seamless business continuity. From automated failover and resiliency in the product to seasoned worldwide support, Platform Symphony delivers complete reliability to our FS customers. The key strength in Platform Symphony comes from its unique de-coupled architecture built with the Platform EGO technology and the service-oriented application middleware component. This de-coupled architecture provides more flexibility and reliability, allowing businesses to be agile and adaptive. 2. Platform Symphony Architecture A full-scale installation of Platform Symphony architecture consists of three subsystems: i. Platform Symphony Developer Edition (DE) is a services-oriented application middleware that enables enterprise application services to be segmented into parallel execution units to be distributed seamlessly on a virtual resource infrastructure (Platform EGO). It enables scheduling and management of service-oriented workloads within different business applications by applying scheduling policies to the resources that are shared between applications through Platform EGO. It also provides easy-to-use APIs and rich design patterns to seamlessly virtualize all types of service-oriented applications with minimal changes. With Platform Symphony Developer Edition (DE) application developers can virtualize, test, debug, and run service-oriented applications without requiring access to resources managed by Platform EGO. 5 Grid-Enabling and Virtualizing Mission-Critical Financial Services Applications ii. Platform EGO provides