BGC Partners Adds Brocade PCIe FC HBAs

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced that BGC Partners, Inc., an intermediary to the wholesale financial markets, has simplified its SAN management capabilities and enhanced operational performance across the globe with Brocade networking solutions.

The company recently standardised on Brocade 415 (single port) and Brocade 425 (dual ports) 4 Gbps Fibre Channel to PCIe host bus adapters. Designed to meet the growing connectivity, virtualization and operating efficiency needs of enterprise data centers, Brocade HBAs provide breakthrough performance, robust services, built-in extensibility and seamless interoperability.

Formed in 1945, BGC Partners is one of the world’s leading inter-dealer brokers, providing integrated voice and electronic services to wholesale market participants across the globe. It is active in the global fixed income, rates, foreign exchange, equity derivatives, credit derivatives, futures and structured product markets. The company offers a full range of brokerage services, including price discovery, trade execution, straight-through processing and clearing, settlement and access to electronic trading services.

Delivering brokerage platforms that allow traders to manage huge financial portfolios places tremendous demands on BGC Partners’ storage infrastructure. BGC Partners manages a multi-tiered data centre environment that includes EMC V-Max, EMC CLARiiON, EMC DMX-3 and HP EVAs all linked by a Brocade SAN fabric. The fabric features Brocade 48000 Directors and Brocade 5300 Switches, which must deliver maximum availability and reliability to ensure that traders can perform at optimum levels.

The firm’s existing HBAs were proving to be a weak link in the company’s network, affecting business applications and overall system performance. For example, the Small Form-Factor Pluggables (SFP) module that BGC Partners had been using with its HBA was not hot-swappable. Therefore, even if there was only an SFP module failure, the HBA itself had to be replaced, resulting in longer downtime. In addition, the HBA did not have a log tracking capability. As a result, the IT organization had to spend time identifying the failure and its cause. This resulted in longer recovery times, which negatively impacted user productivity. To overcome this challenge, BGC Partners conducted a competitive tender and found the Brocade 415/425 HBAs to be the ideal solution.

"We have been relying on Brocade SAN solutions for many years, and we are fully satisfied with their quality and reliability. This definitely led us to the decision we made to adopt Brocade HBAs," explains Sean Winter, senior storage analyst at BGC Partners. "Integrating Brocade SAN directors, switches and Fibre Channel HBAs has helped reduce issues and improved systems stability. We expect to further improve reliability and operational efficiency by leveraging end-to-end intelligent functionalities and unified management throughout our Brocade environment."

The Brocade 415/425 HBAs lay the foundation for extending fabric intelligence to servers, virtual machines, applications and services. This approach enables tighter integration across the business, including both physical and virtual networks, and to the firm’s disaster recovery site via a Meta SAN (based on the Brocade 7500 extension switch).

By deploying the Brocade 415/425 HBAs, BGC Partners has been able to increase performance and operational simplicity while reducing management complexity. Prior to the Brocade solution, after-hours maintenance slots for vital business applications were limited. The Brocade HBAs have enabled BGC’s Global SAN team to make updates without the need for fabric zoning changes, simplifying management and maintenance.

"SFP port failure, for example, is now much simpler to manage. We can replace an SFP module online, and it’s done," added Winter.

The first Brocade HBA deployment took place in late 2009. Since then, BGC Partners has standardised on the Brocade 415/425 HBAs across the globe.