Skip to content
Search to learn about InterSystems products and solutions, career opportunities, and more.

InterSystems IRIS Complements Existing Data Lake

Major International Investment Bank

person looking at financial graphs on their phone

CUSTOMER: Major international investment bank

CHALLENGE: Address limitations of existing Hadoop data lake, which, unable to support real-time data streams, adequately scale, or meet analytical needs, slowed the response time of the bank’s customer management application.

OUTCOME: Seamless integration of InterSystems IRIS data platform with existing data lake enables advanced querying, ability to scale and handle large data volumes, and high-speed real-time data processing. Bank’s analytic needs are met across business lines for portfolio analysis, risk, and compliance.

Enables Real-Time Capabilities, Advanced Analytics, and Scalability

When one of the world’s largest investment banks was impacted by limitations with its Hadoop data lake, it implemented InterSystems IRIS® data platform as a dynamic data layer between the data lake and its production applications. The result not only addressed the bank’s growing list of requirements, but also saved money by leveraging existing hardware.

With a high performance transactional-analytic database engine, a complete integration platform and a rich set of embedded analytics capabilities, InterSystems IRIS integrates seamlessly with the data lake to combine and process historical data with current transactions at the rate of 50 megabytes per second and with a response time under 100 milliseconds. And while enabling more than 100 concurrent connections, it meets the bank’s analytic needs across business lines for such use cases as portfolio analysis, risk, and compliance.

Problem: Limited Analytics, Slow Response

Problems with the petabyte-sized Hadoop data lake impacted the bank’s customer management application, which it used to query customer assets and demonstrate that trades met regulatory requirements. The application was slow, responding to queries in seconds when it should have responded in milliseconds.

The petabyte-sized Hadoop data lake, while acceptable for historical analysis, had a mass of limitations, including its inability to support real-time data streams, scale out efficiently, or support the organization’s analytical needs. It could handle only simple queries, so the bank was hampered in its analysis reporting. What’s more, the data lake could not store previous, frequently used query results, resulting in inefficiencies and duplication of effort.

Ideally, the bank needed an application that could complement the existing data lake while also accommodating real-time data, facilitating more sophisticated queries, and handling large volumes of data at a low cost.

Vice President, Global Investment Bank

Solution: Seamless Integration of InterSystems IRIS

InterSystems IRIS, which easily integrates with existing systems and applications, could meet the bank’s performance requirements at scale. The solution was to add it to the existing configuration to support the complex queries the former architecture could not.

The new architecture includes a data access layer, which, feeding on the data lake, links to the InterSystems IRIS data platform via a message bus. Storing a few days of query history, InterSystems IRIS, in turn, feeds the application programming interface for data analysis. What’s more, it combines shared-nothing and shared-everything architectures for enhanced performance.

The data platform’s cloud-friendly architecture and its ability to run and scale on commodity hardware meant the bank could leverage its existing hardware infrastructure.

“InterSystems IRIS data platform is a wonderful product that gives the scale and performance of an in-memory database at a much lower cost for very large multi-terabyte datasets,” says a vice president at the bank.

RELATED TOPICS

Take The Next Step

We’d love to talk. Fill in some details and we’ll be in touch.
*Required Fields
Highlighted fields are required
*Required Fields
Highlighted fields are required
** By selecting yes, you give consent to be contacted for news, updates and other marketing purposes related to existing and future InterSystems products and events. In addition, you consent to your business contact information being entered into our CRM solution that is hosted in the United States, but maintained consistent with applicable data protection laws.