SEI may move from EMC data storage to Oracle Exadata to support expected high volume data growth rates for its new Global Wealth Platform, SEI SVP Steven Zeh told Wikibon CEO David Velante in an interview on SiliconAngle.tv from Oracle Open World Monday.

Nine years in development, the Global Wealth Platform is a new service SEI plans to market to large banks to support their wealth management services for their customers. The system has been developed on the Oracle software data stack using EMC data storage. This is a major investment for SEI, a long-term EMC customer, as measured by the 600-strong development and operations team it has built to support the service.

At present the Global Wealth Platform uses about 150-200 terabytes of storage, but that includes data clones used for development paralleling the operational environment. Most of that is traditional structured financial data, with about 20 terabytes of unstructured data – mostly documents that banks typically produce to support their wealth management programs.

Recently, he said, the team did a top-to-bottom refresh of the infrastructure running the program intended mainly to increase its capacity and improve response times. As a result, it was moved from Dmax to Vmax, from Solaris to Linux, and from Sparc to Intel hardware. The result was a 40% performance boost and 50% cost savings.

However, he said, before this refresh he was considering moving to an Oracle Exadata hardware platform. And this is still under consideration.

“If, as we hope, one or more large banks subscribes to the service, handling the large amounts of data that will involve will probably dictate to moving to Exadata appliances,” he said. “Inevitably if this platform grows as we hope it will, the simplicity of Exadata appliances will provide a big advantage.”

On the other hand, he said, “EMC is a very client focused firm. When there’s an issue, they step up every time.” And the absence of a strong cloning utility on Exadata is an issue, particularly for supporting platform development.

As a result, he says, for the present “we will continue leveraging EMC.” And he is watching EMC’s development of Greenplum technology and comparing that to Exadata as a possible platform to support the next chapter in the service’s development. “If they [Greenplum] can deliver the functionality we need in an appliance, we would love to continue the EMC relationship.”


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