The leading provider of online trading services, London Capital Group (LCG) has deployed Nutanix's enterprise cloud solution to host its core financial services, including state-of-the-art trading technology as part of a major investment and rebrand. The aim is to become the spread betting provider of choice for over 70,000 clients and reduce future operational costs as part of a strategy to help LCG make the transition to a global powerhouse. By consolidating computing, virtualisation, and storage into a single highly scalable and turnkey appliance, the Xtreme Computing Platform provides a faster, simplified and more flexible replacement to the company’s end of life IT infrastructure which relied on the conventional server plus SAN architecture. The two installations were completed within two days and a rapid migration of all existing physical and virtual workloads to a VMware environment, while rack space has been slashed by 60%.
By changing the procurement and consumption model for IT, LCG can scale its virtualisation environment with Nutanix’s pay-as-you-grow approach, enabling the business to buy what is required without the inconvenience and expense of storage and compute over-provisioning. The IT team can cope with new workloads and the peaks and troughs in demand across company datacentres within the tightest timescales.
For a small team with limited resources, the ease of scalability and enhanced IT capability has driven far reaching benefits across the mix of Financial Spread Betting (FSB) and Contract for Difference (CFD) solutions marketed under a variety of LCG brands. At the heart of the enhanced trading experience proposition is the company’s cutting-edge online and mobile trading platform, LCG Trader. Thanks to the enterprise cloud solution it is delivering faster and more reliable deal execution time—key performance indicators of any spread betting business.
“Our first Nutanix demo was a real light bulb moment, alerting us to the availability of an equally scalable alternative that could be both quicker to deploy and simpler to manage,” said CIO at London Capital Group, Blair Wright. “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 and we’ve managed with far less headcount than we thought and haven’t had to hire any specialist storage staff.”
Paul Phillips, Regional Director at Nutanix commented, “Our offering delivers an enterprise cloud to businesses which is suited to the speed of LCG’s business, providing cloud-like agility, pay-as-you-grow IT resource consumption and operational simplicity without sacrificing the predictability, security and control of on-premise infrastructure. 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% software-defined offers some much-needed certainty that can be relied upon.”
Buoyed by this successful initial phase of migration, staff at LCG are currently looking at future projects with Nutanix.
