Endorsing the Bull Run

Indiabulls is India's leading retail
financial services company with a network of 135 outlets spread across 95
cities. Indiabulls offers real-time electronic trading capabilities to over
1,30,000 investors across the country, generating a total turnover of Rs 10,000
mn daily in cash and derivatives.

Indiabulls offers investors across the country a secure,
reliable way to carry out their transactions remotely. Using an installable
client application provided by Indiabulls, investors can log in to the
Indiabulls Professional Network from a remote PC. After their identity has been
verified, investors can proceed to send transaction data to the stock exchange.
A confirmation receipt is returned to the investors after the data has been
transmitted. The application server runs an Order Routing System, which manages
the transaction lifecycle.

“This end-to-end transaction round trip takes place in
approximately two seconds; and it's the Internet that takes up a bulk of the
delay,” says Tejinderpal Singh Miglani, CTO, Indiabulls Group.

With approximately 8,000 concurrent investors logged on to
the Indiabulls Professional Network at any given time, there is absolutely no
room for error. During peak loads, investors generate up to 2,000 requests per
minute for which 4,000 responses are triggered in return. During volatile market
days, there are sudden spikes in usage, which adds a further strain to the
database and application server. Explains Miglani, “We needed a high
performance platform that could match our demanding, and continuous availability
needs.”

Approximately 45-50% of Indiabulls' total revenue is
generated online, which totals to about Rs 1 crore daily. A downtime of a single
minute could generate a loss of Rs 50,000 for the company. As the UNIX platform
headed towards uncertainty, Indiabulls decided to migrate to the latest platform
available.

As the number of investors grew, Indiabulls was expecting
the workload to increase significantly. It was also keen to introduce redundancy
into its infrastructure to provide reliable services to its customers.
Indiabulls wanted a low cost platform that could run on commodity hardware
without any compromise in performance or reliability.

After an extensive evaluation phase, Indiabulls found Red
Hat Enterprise Linux to be the perfect choice. “The performance of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux overshadows Windows under benchmark results. Red Hat Enterprise
Linux offers a reliable, robust architecture for which support is easily
available. Also, since we were planning to implement Oracle RAC in future, Red
Hat was the perfect platform, as it offers the maximum pre-certified
configurations for RAC technology,” says Miglani.       

On the hardware front, Indiabulls found high-speed, 32-bit
x86 servers are attractive propositions to invest in. The personal loans system
that falls under Indiabulls Credit Services has also been hosted on Red Hat
Advanced Server 2.1. As the Internet share trading and personal loans
applications were developed in Java, porting to Enterprise Linux was virtually
seamless.

Enterprise Linux running on the x86 architecture has
empowered Indiabulls to purchase more servers and generate 10 times more
performance than its earlier UNIX-RISC infrastructure. “Linux' inherent
security and lower vulnerability to viruses has delivered a hassle free
solution,” claims Miglani.

Indiabulls is now looking at standardizing on Linux and is
also considering migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 to further increase
performance. With growing popularity of Linux on the desktop, Indiabulls is
considering to port its client application to Linux.

Indiabulls has found a robust and reliable solution by
banking its entire online Share Trading platform on Enterprise Linux. With its
mission critical needs satisfied by Enterprise Linux running on low cost
servers, Indiabulls has managed to procure a cost effective alternative to
proprietary technologies.  

Team DQ 

mail@dqindia.com