BNP Paribas has been a loyal Sysload customer since 2001, confident in its partner's ability to cope with the strong growth in its number of servers. This number has increased tenfold in the space of six years. Today, some forty SP Analyst consoles located in
Paris
,
London
,
Tokyo
and Hong-Kong discreetly but very closely monitor the thousands of servers used by the various trading rooms. During activity surges, which occur when transaction orders are submitted in bulk, hundreds of metrics are collected, totally transparently, every five seconds.
Summary :
Company: BNP Paribas Arbitrage (a unit of the Corporate and Investment Banking division [CIB])
Head Office: Paris
Activity: Equities and equity derivatives management
Workforce: 14,300 (at the CIB business unit)
Net banking income: €7.9 billion in 2006 (out of a BNP Paribas total of €27 billion)
The challenge : guarantee multiple order submissions and monitor a large number of servers without disrupting their operation
The solution: 40 SP Analyst Observer consoles and 2,600 system and application agents
The benefit: Simple to use and deploy in a heterogeneous, distributed production environment + well-suited to application monitoring (database and application server)
About BNP Paribas Arbitrage
BNP Paribas is one of the world's largest banking and financial services groups, with extensive international coverage and a strong presence in the world’s main stock markets. BNP Paribas Arbitrage is a subsidiary specializing in advisory and capital markets services, focused mainly on the purchase and sale of equities and equity derivatives. Traders' workstations are hosted in trading rooms equipped with extensive IT and communication resources.
The Challenge
The trader's mission is to successfully predict market movements and offer their clients the best prices for financial transactions. Responsiveness and the ability to anticipate events are two key factors for traders who submit transaction orders practically in real time. The success of this constant race against time, the aim of which is to harness a series of mechanisms directly related to stock markets around the world, depends on robust, powerful infrastructure that is optimized in capacity management terms.
Against this backdrop, the IT department at BNP Paribas Arbitrage is responsible for providing reliable IT systems that are operational five days a week. Its role includes ensuring that the large number of transaction orders submitted are executed quickly, (i.e. faster than competitors) particularly when multiple superimposed orders arrive in the space of a second.
The task of ensuring interruption-free real-time flows and absorbing intense activity surges has been a daily challenge ever since the subsidiary was created in 2001.
"When the subsidiary was launched, we wanted to break free of the numerous scripts and restrictive, costly solutions introduced by large administration frameworks" explains Jean-Michel Garcia, IT project manager with BNP Paribas. "Our subsidiary has defended a policy geared to a specific solution based on slim agents that are fast to install and offer significant configuration flexibility while delivering performance levels that let us monitor our servers in real time."
The IT department searched for tools that would make it possible to continuously monitor the health status and utilization rates of its production servers.
The Solution
After examining a number of offers, BNP Paribas chose the Sysload solution over its competitors on account of its ease of use and speed of deployment. "We wanted to make the tool usable both by the people in charge of putting applications into production and by those responsible for managing the system" explained Jean Michel Garcia. The impressive price/performance ratio delivered by Sysload products was also perfectly in line with the priorities of the day.
Sysload's product, renamed SP Analyst in late 2006, is one of three modules in the Sysload software suite. These three monitoring, analysis and reporting tools are designed for different requirements and user profiles, but all three use the same metric collection architecture, based on a distributed agent model. Each agent, optimized to suit its host system, maintains a local log of the data collected by its embedded measuring and analysis modules, ensuring that the agent combines collection performance and discretion.
In accordance with their prerequisites, BNP Paribas trading room managers can now perform real-time and historical monitoring of the operational metrics of thousands of servers running Solaris 8 and 10, Windows 2000 and 2003, and 32- and 64-bit Linux operating systems, all at very detailed time resolutions. Applications, particularly Weblogic, are monitored by relaying SNMP alerts from the application MIBs. Sysload Feedback for IP monitors user response times in IP environments.
The SP Analyst performance monitoring and analysis solution performs system diagnostics and generates real-time performance trend charts for the complete infrastructure. Its main purpose is to detect saturation problems and malfunctions by identifying the factors responsible for deteriorations in service. SP Analyst uses metrics in conjunction with powerful statistical functions to anticipate changes in system activity and their potential impact on infrastructure capabilities. SP Analyst provides rapid access to server and application operating histories and is able to "replay" their activity.
"We needed an administration tool with capacity management and event logging functions capable of handling activity surges over very short time lapses" points out J.-M. Garcia. In productivity terms, SP Analyst considerably reduces down-time, thanks to automatic failure detection, proactive problem and incident resolution and email- or SMS-based alerts.
The Results
By minimizing the time required to deploy its solution across the initial group of 250 and to train IT staff in its use, the Sysload solution successfully fulfilled the part of its mission relating to ease and speed of implementation. "The system yielded immediate results, with a quick and modular installation procedure. Currently, SP Analyst tackles our problems instantly, as it is a point-to-point solution that does not depend on heavy infrastructure." explains J.-M. Garcia.
Additionally, Sysload integrated with existing systems, which had to be taken into account. Today, some 60 operations and infrastructure staff use Sysload SP Analyst to check resource occupancy rates, track business instances and monitor the infrastructure underpinning their applications. "The everyday benefits are seen most clearly in terms of responsiveness. Our business involves constant observation and SP Analyst is used extensively as a watchdog system that triggers call-out alerts for night-duty personnel" notes J.-M. Garcia.
Determining the optimum capacity of individual servers is another key preoccupation of BNP’s IT department. This cannot be based on observed averages, but rather on narrowly-defined extremes. Sysload technology enables the installed agents to collect hundreds of server-related metrics every five seconds, without disrupting server operation. "At our facility, there is a Unix Sysload agent capable of collecting between 7 and 10 million measurements every hour on a large server with hundreds of processes and disks, while generating negligible additional load. This level of performance is a major benefit for the real-time operation of our trading room.
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