Flash Storage Architecture for Financial Data Center
Critical migration to NVMe-oF and consolidation of data silos for a leading banking entity.
The Challenge and Our Approach
A major Spanish bank was facing unacceptable latencies in its algorithmic trading systems and difficulties scaling its legacy SAS disk-based storage. Isolated data silos prevented a unified view and slowed down real-time risk analysis. The challenge was to design an ultra-low latency storage infrastructure that could support transaction peaks, consolidate data, and guarantee absolute resilience.
Our approach was based on a disaggregated all-flash array (AFA) storage architecture. We implemented an NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) network over 100Gb Ethernet, separating compute from storage for independent scalability. We deployed software-defined data (SDS) layer software to unify management and create automatically tiered storage pools, from tier 0 NVMe to QLC for cold data.
Results and Validation Materials
The implementation reduced data access latency by 94%, from 12ms to 0.7ms, enabling faster and more accurate trading operations. We consolidated 8 storage silos into a single manageable platform, freeing up 40% of data center space. Operational efficiency improved dramatically, with an estimated 35% savings in three-year TCO costs thanks to reduced licensing, power, and administrative complexity.
Validation materials include detailed benchmark reports comparing IOPS and latency pre/post-implementation, NVMe-oF network architecture diagrams, and a real-time monitoring dashboard showing the health and performance of the unified storage pool. The client confirmed full compliance with performance and availability SLAs (99.999%).