YJFX, Inc., a financial subsidiary of the Yahoo Group focused on foreign exchange services, has successfully adopted its use of Red Hat’s massively scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering to re-construct and maintain its new private cloud infrastructure. YJFX, which provides trading and investment services in 22 currencies, chose Red Hat to improve customer service, the delivery of new products and services, and to achieve what it estimates to be 30% to 40% cost savings on its previous operating model.
Cloud computing has been with us for decades, but Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications came into their own in the past ten years. The leap in technology allowed users to shrink IT departments, eliminate costly hardware and software upgrades, and allow for pay-as-you-go scalability. Cost savings were immense, and firms could now focus limited resources on their respective missions. In natural progression, we now have “IaaS” (Infrastructure as a Service) and “PaaS” (Platform as a Service) variations on the theme, each allowing for cost savings and more efficient use of internal resources. The first step in the YJFX migration process focused on the dealing room, which converted successfully back in April of this year. Other departments followed.
The previous IT environment for YJFX utilized the public cloud infrastructure, which delivered on its initial promise of cost savings and additional efficiencies, but the time to market for new services was constrained by a manual process that could add as much as a month or more to timelines, resulting in increased costs. The new system network changes will allow its IT team to deliver innovation much more quickly than before. What previously required a month of effort can now be accomplished in hours.
Hikaru Saito, manager, System Management Department, YJFX, Inc., told reporters from Odessa that:
We had sought information infrastructures which enable us to implement new services and features demanded by customers more quickly, safely and surely, in the online financial service market where we see competition intensifying. At the same time, it was required to reduce operational costs and the burdens on our personnel in charge of infrastructures and providing a speedy and flexible development environment for application developers. With the adoption of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, we now have an ideal development environment in place.
Mochizuki Hirokazu, president and representative director, Red Hat K.K., added:
Red Hat OpenStack Platform enables flexible and scalable cloud-native infrastructure that can also provide on-demand, self-service capabilities to developers. By migrating the development environment from an external virtual environment to an on-premises private, cloud YJFX was able to reduce the workload on the personnel in charge of infrastructure and bring about more developer flexibility.
The conversion process began with a collaborative information discovery session led by staff from Red Hat’s consultancy service. After defining necessary deliverables, the team went through an additional visualization process to conceptualize how an ideal solution would work. This work provided the final migration plan. YJFX then selected the DTS CORPORATION, a systems integrator, to manage the implementation and final migration of the IT environment over to the customized Red Hat private IaaS solution.
Naoyoshi Kawashima, Enterprise and Solution Division 2, DTS CORPORATION, spoke to the ease of the conversion process:
When we supported YJFX to introduce Red Hat OpenStack Platform, careful tuning was required in accordance with their unique systems and application environments. Backed by consulting support from Red Hat, the migration was successfully done. Also, by using Red Hat OpenStack Platform director, changes in the setting and repeating deployment operations could be performed efficiently.