Fulcrum Asset Management

Discover how YellowDog helped Fulcrum Asset Management transform how they utilised on-premise and cloud computing power. The result was a record performance and financial improvement.

Background 

Fulcrum Asset Management were looking to accelerate their cloud transformation and improve their ability to securely burst workloads to multiple clouds, all while still ensuring budget and performance were optimised to make the best use of on-premise and cloud resources.

Read on for more information and download the case study PDF at the bottom of this article…

The Problems

SINGLE VENDOR

Fulcrum’s systems had been developed internally, using a single cloud provider when workloads required more compute resources. This strategy had provided some advantages. However, it also presented the team with challenges:

• Performance: Fulcrum’s back-testing would often require over 1,000 cloud instances. The team had observed issues with machine availability and boot time, which extended run times or, in some cases, meant workloads had to be restarted the next day.
• Price: Due to the ad hoc nature of the workloads, they were run on machines hired by the hour. This exposed Fulcrum to spikes in market pricing and also risked data loss if the instance was distributed to another bidder before finishing its task.

COMPLIANCE & CONTROL

Fulcrum wanted to ensure cloud costs were optimised to avoid overspending through over-provisioning or letting instances continue running when they were no longer needed.
To further control costs and ensure maximum return on capital investment, Fulcrum needed to have the ability to prioritise the utilisation of their on-premise computing resources before bursting to the cloud.

The Solution

The YellowDog Platform was integrated with Fulcrum’s systems and the YellowDog Agent deployed on Fulcrum’s on-premise servers as well as being added to Fulcrum’s compute images across multiple clouds:

• The YellowDog Platform contains the intelligence and the machine learning to parse the workload and orchestrate the compute
• The YellowDog Agent resides on the compute that is made available to YellowDog and informs the Platform when that compute is available
• Fulcrum integrated with YellowDog through API, which then provided access to YellowDog services and multiple cloud providers in a single connection

The Results

CLOUD TRANSFORMATION

Working with YellowDog accelerated Fulcrum’s cloud transformation by several years and enabled them to be one of the first in their market to become cloud agnostic. The freedom to optimise their cloud use and intelligently utilise on-premise hardware will save the business significant amounts on Capex and Opex, while helping improve business performance through the delivery of business intelligence far faster than before.

CLIENT & REGULATORY COMPLIANCE

Real-Time monitoring of active workloads and cloud provider performance by the YellowDog Platform and Agent has delivered the highest resilience in the market to provider outages and other issues. Where an issue is identified, YellowDog automates the lifting and shifting of active workloads to new locations or providers in seconds. This avoids any significant interruption to critical services – a key requirement for business continuity.

FASTER DECISION MAKING

YellowDog’s Compute Orchestration feature has halved the time it takes to bring up 1,000 instances. It feeds information back into the business faster than ever before and helps Fulcrum to stay ahead of the market.

The Fulcrum team no longer experience any bottlenecks when scaling to 1,000 instances and beyond. They have been maximising the cost efficiency and performance of every instance. Furthermore, the monitoring and reverse-burst strategy has given Fulcrum the confidence to run analyses 24/7. This is because the YellowDog Platform provides the control to manage all scaling and continually evaluates if more cost-effective resources are available which would still deliver the information to the business within the target deadline.