Financial Fund Administrator HedgeServ Opts for SolidFire/NetApp

SolidFire, Inc., part of NetApp, Inc., announced that the fund administration SaaS pioneer, HedgeServ, has chosen its all-flash scale-out storage for its real-time technology platform that enables asset managers to grow their portfolios, compete in the dynamic investment management market, and meet client-specific investment goals.

HedgeServ has deployed SolidFire for both its production and test/dev environments to support all alternative investment strategies and fund structures, as well as continuously develop and deploy customized client applications.

HedgeServ is an independent fund administrator with client-centric service and real-time technology platform. With 1,000+ professionals across ten offices servicing over $300 billion of assets for more than 195 clients, SaaS offerings must be available 24/7 for its geographically dispersed customers that interact with financial markets across time zones. As word of HedgeServ’s standout services spread throughout the investment industry, the company has expanded organically along with its user base and also by taking market share away from competitors. That, in turn, drove a need for scalability – for a storage solution that could support rapid business growth.

“SolidFire transforms storage from a significant cost and management burden at HedgeServ into an innovation enabler,” said Isa Berisha, director of global platform engineering, HedgeServ. “HedgeServ is taking advantage of SolidFire to unleash its business and IT agility, and to create pioneering new client services – our advantage for staying profitable and competitive.“

HedgeServ selected SolidFire to run its VMware integrated OpenStack inside its automated DevOps environment. SolidFire’s API enables HedgeServ to leverage Chef and PowerShell to automate the QA process and create repeatable workflows in its application stack to apply fine-grain permissions and to automate and provision 300+ ESX hosts. With SolidFire, HedgeServ has scaled both capacity and performance incrementally as its DevOps environment has more than doubled in the last year, while leveraging SolidFire’s guaranteed QoS to deliver predictable performance to every client workload.

HedgeServ runs both its test/dev and 95% of its production workloads on SolidFire. Where it took 30 minutes to an hour to deploy a VM, with SolidFire, it takes less than a few minutes. HedgeServ’s QA process used to take 18 hours; now it’s down to less than two hours. With the HedgeServ development community moving toward both continuous integration and agile development, SolidFire brings scalability and performance to backend resources, including databases. Accelerating QA processes means they can be run more often, for faster and better releases.

SolidFire provides a scale-out all-flash storage platform designed to deliver guaranteed performance to thousands of application workloads side-by-side, allowing consolidation under a single platform. The SolidFire system can be combined over a 10GbE network or 8/16Gb FC clients in clusters ranging from four to 100 nodes. It ensures performance with fine-grain QoS, performance virtualization, and the ability to adjust resources on the fly.