Problem

With our roots in the financial services industry, it was no surprise when a large hedge fund in Boston approached ArcLight requiring assistance to overhaul their outdated and chaotic IT Infrastructure. This hedge fund had attempted to accomplish their goals working with a combination of internal IT resources and large managed service providers over the years but to no avail. It had become clear that their technology challenges required exceptional technical and industry expertise coupled with the dedicated time and attention for which ArcLight is known.. 

This firm’s stated project request was an extensive equipment overhaul, but the real key to resolving their technical issues was actually in the management of the top-down plan rather than getting lost in individual technical requests. Previous vendors had worked within their individual specializations without proper big picture oversight of the client's needs. ArcLight approached this challenge from a project management point of view, bringing everything together into a simple harmonious strategy with the client’s long-term goals in mind. 

From a technical standpoint, our solutions included providing up to three full time engineers on site daily to handle the backlog of end-user issues and then ongoing daily support, developing a secure remote access strategy for remote workers, vastly improving their disaster recovery and business continuity plan, supporting the migration of over 30 servers to Amazon Web Services, as well as implementing the latest in on-premises hyper-converged solutions to reduce and simplify the in-house footprint.  
 

Solution

Working closely with their in-house technical staff, ArcLight formed a strategic plan to overhaul the entire hedge fund infrastructure. We started by augmenting their technical staff with ArcLight technicians who could devote their full energies to understanding the existing platforms and putting out the fires of end-user needs. Once we had a solid snapshot of their needs,  our first priority was to implement a solid backup solution to ensure that their data would be secure and began planning a long-term stable hybrid platform of on-site and cloud systems.

For their in-house infrastructure, we first replaced their aging LAN networking with a stack of modern switches and a 10Gbps backbone. Using this new backbone we deployed a Hyperconverged solution of Virtualized host servers, which allowed us to consolidate roughly three full racks of servers down into a platform that took up less than half of a single rack. This allowed huge savings on power and cooling bills as well as reclaiming some of their office footprint. We created a remote desktop solution for some users, allowing them to access a single desktop environment regardless of their physical location, enhancing security as well as functionality for them. We also streamlined their new workstation deployment by automating a large part of the work required to setup and configure PCs for the end users.

Working closely with their development team we migrated all of their development and client facing systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and tied that directly into their office with a 1Gbps AWS Direct Connect networking link to ensure no speed bottlenecks. In parallel, we upgraded their security detection and analysis systems to a more modern platform in order to support the faster data flow involved. This has allowed them to quickly spin-up development and testing servers in the cloud as needed and greatly accelerated their development process as a result. By having ArcLight project manage the entire infrastructure, we were able to execute a comprehensive solution that fit their immediate and long-term growth goals.

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