Arihant Capital Markets Ltd is one of India’s leading financial services providers, offering security, equity and commodity trading, financial planning, and merchant and investment banking services to more than 145,000 customers. Headquartered in Mumbai, India, Arihant Capital operates 21 branches and 800 investment centers in 185 cities nationwide, employing some 800 people.
Founded with the mission to generate wealth and help its customers succeed financially, Arihant Capital is committed to making its investment services as accessible as possible. To complement its in-branch, phone and online services, the company decided to release a mobile app.
Dipak Rout, Head of IT at Arihant Capital, comments: “More and more people, particularly younger generations, want to be able to manage their money on their smartphones. We have been engaged in digital transformation for some time now to improve the customer experience, and knew that mobile was the next big step we had to take to remain competitive in this segment of the market.”
In response to demand, the company developed Arihant Mobile: a state-of-the-art smartphone app that lets customers swipe to trade, track their portfolio in real time and get live streaming stock-market data at the touch of a button.
Next, Arihant Capital needed to find the right infrastructure to run its new mobile application and turned to technology partner Orient Technology for support. Rout recalls: “We considered several options before coming to the conclusion that only a hyperconverged infrastructure offered the level of elasticity and scalability required.”
With help from Orient Technology, Arihant Capital replaced its existing three-tier architecture with a three-node Lenovo ThinkAgile HX1320 cluster. Combining reliable Lenovo servers with powerful Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software, the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform offers unparalleled agility and flexibility.
Thanks in large part to the Intel Xeon Scalable processors, the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform has given us a huge performance boost, helping us to deliver a great user experience for Arihant Mobile customers.”— Dipak Rout, Head of IT at Arihant Capital
Rout comments: “What initially attracted us to the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform was its simplicity. It’s an all-in-one, software-defined stack, which takes away all the hassle of managing multiple server, storage and networking components, and makes increasing capacity a breeze.
“We recently added a fourth HX2320 node with 2nd gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors to the cluster and were delighted by just how easy it is to scale our new hyperconverged infrastructure. It was as straightforward as connecting the new node to the cluster and synching it with Nutanix Acropolis. Demand for Arihant Mobile has exceeded our expectations, and we are currently in the process of deploying a fifth HX2320 node to increase capacity even further.”
With ThinkAgile HX in place, Arihant Capital is well equipped to accommodate the surge in demand for mobile trading products.
“Uptake of Arihant Mobile has been excellent and we’re looking to add more mobile apps to our product portfolio,” says Rout. “With the hyperconverged infrastructure, we can spin up virtual machines to use for development and testing in a matter of minutes. Developers can do their thing and then delete the instances when they’re finished. It’s very flexible, very quick and very easy. Previously, it took three or four weeks to procure, implement and set up a new environment. Thanks to the cloud-like agility of ThinkAgile HX, it now takes just 30 minutes. This helps developers work more productively and accelerates time to market, enabling us to get new products out to customers faster than ever.”
Arihant Capital has also seen performance rise and costs fall since moving to the Lenovo, Intel and Nutanix solution. The company has consolidated its physical footprint from three racks to just one rack, reducing power consumption from 15 kW to 5 kW, saving around $14,000 a year in energy costs—a saving that Arihant Capital can then reinvest in product development.
Rout adds: “Thanks in large part to the Intel Xeon Scalable processors, the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform has given us a huge performance boost, helping us to deliver a great user experience for Arihant Mobile customers.”
The IT team is happier too. With the Nutanix Prism and Lenovo XClarity management tools under their belt, infrastructure management and maintenance couldn’t be simpler. “Being able to monitor, provision and manage the virtualized compute and storage resources with a single tool has made life so much easier,” says Rout. “Nutanix Prism is so intuitive that pretty much anyone can use it, enabling us to work more productively. We also use Lenovo XClarity to deploy infrastructure and manage firmware updates. I’m a big fan of the XClarity mobile app, as I get timely alerts if any potential issues crop up.”
The Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform is reliable, performant and scalable—the ideal foundation for our new mobile offering.”– Dipak Rout, Head of IT, Arihant Capital Markets Ltd
Backed by Lenovo Support Services, Arihant Capital knows that, should problems ever arise, they will be dealt with swiftly. Rout comments: “We’ve not had much reason to call on Lenovo Support, but every time we have engaged them the quality of service has been brilliant. The Lenovo team has always gone above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that issues are resolved quickly, and are a pleasure to deal with.”
He concludes: “The Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform is reliable, performant, and scalable—the ideal foundation for our new mobile offering. As the popularity of mobile trading grows, we are confident that we can scale operations to satisfy demand—and turn customers’ smartphones into money-making machines.”
Solution Components
Hardware
- Lenovo ThinkAgile HX1320 with Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors
- Lenovo ThinkAgile HX2320 with 2nd gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, Acropolis, Prism
- Lenovo XClarity
- Lenovo Support Services
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