ASHIKA GROUPDelivering stellar client services that keep money moving.Financial services provider Ashika Group swaps legacy data center infrastructure for a powerful hyperconverged solution from Lenovo and Nutanix—keeping its mission-critical trading platform running reliably and client services on track.

Ashika Group is one of India’s leading financial services providers, offering everything from currency and commodity trading to portfolio management and investment banking services. Headquartered in Kolkata, the group employs 200 people and works with a national network of 400 sub-brokers and business partners to deliver its services across India. Since its foundation in 1994, Ashika Group has served more than 100,000 clients.

Ashika Group relies on a wide range of IT systems to support its financial services portfolio, most notably its core Open Dealer Integrated Network (ODIN) trading platform, which it uses for cash, derivative, mutual fund, IPO, currency and commodity trading.

The group also depends on a core set of line-of-business and back-office applications to keep day-to-day operations running smoothly. It is therefore vital that the IT infrastructure underpinning these IT systems runs reliably—day in, day out.

Arunava Nandi, AVP IT at Ashika Group, begins: “Our existing infrastructure was made up of 30 individual servers and storage devices. These were all approaching end of life, so performance and reliability was not what it once was, and unplanned downtime was becoming a challenge. What’s more, managing and maintaining so many systems was becoming increasingly time-consuming, which put mounting pressure on the IT team.”

When the time came for Ashika Group to refresh its data center infrastructure, the IT team decided to look beyond the traditional three-tier architecture set-up in favor of a hyperconverged infrastructure.

Rahul Bhootra, IT Consultant at Ashika Group, recalls: “Our technology partner Smart Planet suggested that we look at hyperconverged offerings, and we were impressed by the simplicity, flexibility and scalability they promised to deliver. Nutanix is a market leader in the hyperconverged space, so we chose them as our preferred software provider. When we discovered that Nutanix had partnered with Lenovo on a pre-configured hyperconverged appliance, we were sold. In our view, Lenovo’s reputation for high-quality, reliable hardware is second to none.”

Ashika Group worked closely with a team from Lenovo Professional Services to install a three-node Lenovo ThinkAgile HX3310 cluster at its primary data center, before migrating the ODIN platform and all other business applications over to the new infrastructure.

Arunava Nandi notes: “The support we received from Lenovo before, during and after the implementation was excellent. The Lenovo team ran several in-depth training sessions, which gave our IT team the skills and confidence they needed to manage the infrastructure going forward.”

Powered by Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, the new solution pools compute and storage resources across the clustered nodes into a single shared virtual structure, offering greater flexibility and more efficient resource utilization than three-tier architecture solutions.

Rahul Bhootra notes: “We replaced 30 servers and storage devices with just three nodes—a tenth of our previous physical footprint. Our data center infrastructure is now so much simpler. Not only are there far fewer machines to maintain, but we can manage all the virtualized resources with Nutanix Prism, which is an incredibly intuitive tool. It saves us so much time and makes life much easier.”

Equipped with Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX appliances deliver a significant boost in performance and reliability.

Arunava Nandi says: “We no longer have any problems with unplanned downtime. The Lenovo-Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure provides 99.9% uptime, and applications are running faster, too. When we need to reboot an application, it now takes less than 30 seconds, compared to 15 minutes before. Enhancements like these are empowering us to deliver a better, more responsive service to our clients.”

Ashika Group recently expanded the capacity its hyperconverged infrastructure by adding two Lenovo ThinkAgile HX3320 nodes to the cluster. Rahul Bhootra comments: “Demand for our services is growing all the time, and we’re expanding year on year. Having an IT infrastructure that we can easily scale is a huge advantage, as it means we can quickly ramp up resources as and when needed.”

Looking to the future, Ashika Group plans to add more nodes to its ThinkAgile HX cluster as it continues to grow its client base and expand its portfolio of services.

Arunava Nandi concludes: “We’re delighted with the reliability, performance and scalability of our Lenovo hyperconverged infrastructure, as well as the support services that the Lenovo team brings to the table. We know that we can depend on Lenovo to keep our mission-critical trading platform and business applications online, and our operations running smoothly.”

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“We know that we can depend on Lenovo to keep our mission-critical

trading platform and business applications online, and our

operations running smoothly.” – Arunava Nandi, AVP IT, Ashika Group

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