16 July 2017
London Capital Group (LCG) specialises in online trading services and has now deployed an enterprise cloud solution from Nutanix to host its core financial services as part of a major investment and re-brand. The firm says this will support its aim to become the spread betting provider of choice for more than 70,000 clients, and reduce future operational costs as it expands globally.
LCG is using Nutanix’s Xtreme Computing Platform to consolidate its computing, virtualisation and storage resources. The vendor claims that its single, highly scalable and turnkey appliance has given LCG a faster, simplified and more flexible replacement for its end-of-life IT infrastructure which previously relied on conventional server and SAN architecture.
According to Nutanix, all the installations were completed within two days. This included a “rapid” migration of all existing physical and virtual workloads to a VMware environment, while rack space has now been cut by 60 per cent.
The company adds that thanks to a “pay-as-you-grow” approach, LCG can scale its virtualisation environment and change its procurement and consumption model for IT as necessary. It reckons the group’s IT team can cope with new workloads along with the peaks and troughs in demand across its data centres within the “tightest” time scales.
LCG CIO Blair Wright says: “The reduction in the complexity of installation and diverse skill set requirement we would have had with other vendors has been a major factor in keeping to our deadlines. We’ve managed with far less headcount than we thought, and haven’t had to hire any specialist storage staff.”
Nutanix adds that the ease of scalability and enhanced IT capability has far reaching benefits across the mix of financial solutions marketed by LCG. At their heart is LCG Trader, the company’s online and mobile trading platform. Thanks to the enterprise cloud solution, it is now delivering faster and more reliable deal execution time – a key performance indicator of any spread betting business.
“While the world of spread betting may be all about risk, the resilience and predictability that comes with deploying web-scale infrastructure that is 100 per cent software-defined offers some much-needed certainty that can be relied upon,” says Paul Phillips, regional director, Nutanix.
