Savvis: considering hybrid cloud for capital markets clients

Sep 08, 2009 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) -- SVVS | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- IT services company Savvis is considering the implementation of a cloud infrastructure for capital markets customers to share among themselves. The shared cloud would be ringfenced for that particular vertical and accessed exclusively over private links; however, Savvis will still have to reassure the understandably cautious industry of the service's security and exclusivity to encourage uptake.

The financial sector is Savvis' largest vertical, for which it has four distinct lines offerings: proximity hosting, whereby a buy- or sell-side firm can place its algorithmic servers in Savvis' data centers with fiber links into a trading venue's matching engines; web solutions for online trading platforms offered to retail and active traders, wealth and asset management and financial institutions' corporate portals; software-as-a-service (SaaS), in which software vendors can place their front-, middle- and back-office applications in its data centers and offer them to financial institutions as a service rather than licensed software; and cloud services.

The last of these areas has two modalities: a dedicated infrastructure offering known as Dedicated Cloud Compute, in which the server, storage and network infrastructure is located in Savvis' data centers, belongs to Savvis and is devoted exclusively to a single customer; and a shared infrastructure service called Open Cloud Compute, in which pooled computing resources are provided to multiple customers in an anonymous, on-demand basis and at a lower price point. The Dedicated service comprises infrastructure that understands the quality of service settings for the enterprise market, and is linked up over a private network connection from Savvis.

A common use case for clouds among capital markets clients is that many investment banks and buy-side firms such as hedge funds will have their private grid infrastructure for such functions as Monte Carlo simulation and risk analysis hosted in a Savvis data center, yet will need to add capacity on the fly at critical points in the execution of the application.

Building out such a large-scale computing infrastructure requires a very large investment, which is a major barrier of entry for many institutions. While the Dedicated Cloud Compute offering allows the customer to re-purpose other infrastructure for the computing task, the total amount of resources available are limited by the amount of infrastructure dedicated to that customer. Open Cloud permits the customer to tap into additional infrastructure as needed, but could raise security concerns for some financial services institutions, at least with regard to some of their more critical applications. In other words, an investment bank needs to be sure it will not be sharing capacity with just anyone.

Hence the idea of a cloud exclusively for the use of customers in the capital markets, yet shared among them. The current architecture under consideration would see each customer have their own "beachhead" in the data center, where they would run their private cloud of servers, storage and network infrastructure on a Dedicated contract, also running their management platform there and, of course, with a link to their own corporate offices and data center.

Each beachhead would also be linked into a shared capital markets infrastructure in the data center, so that it can reach into that pool of resources (the favored term for such activity is a "cloudburst") as and when required. The beachhead concept has the added advantage that the customer's sensitive data would reside, from a storage perspective, in an area that is completely and exclusively under its control.

Rik Turner

http://www.datamonitor.com

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