Financial services institutions are facing post-pandemic challenges including fraud and fierce competition in AI and ML. Learn how Aerospike on HPE Superdome Flex can help FSIs modernize.
The pandemic proved that financial services institutions (FSIs) are extremely resilient. They have emerged stronger than ever before. But according to Deloitte, they are also now facing a whole new set of challenges: the redefined workplace, extreme competition for talent, and a number of pitfalls as a result of digital transformation — because not every transformation investment lives up to its potential.1
Security threats to financial organizations continue to increase in scope and frequency. The cost of fraud is 10% higher than before the pandemic, according to research reported by Forbes, with a global annual cost of trillions of dollars.
In addition, FinTech and InsurTech companies are also proving serious competition to more traditional banks, often with more advanced capabilities around AI, ML, and personalized customer experiences. The need to compete with these digitally native rivals has led CIOs from traditional FSIs to prioritize investments in security and AI/ML — 41% of bank CIOs are using automation to address security challenges, while firms offering AI and ML solutions have been at the forefront of M&A focus in recent years. Having secure infrastructure, with capability to work with billions of transactions in real-time, is key to making these transformational investments work.
Act on distributed data in real time
To address these challenges, FSIs who want to power globally distributed, data-intensive workloads such as AI and ML are using Aerospike, a real-time data platform that delivers high performance, scale, consistency and low total cost of operations.
Aerospike is a NoSQL database platform designed to handle large-scale, multi-cloud data sources. It operates:
- At unlimited scale. With predictable, real-time performance when handling petabytes of data in mission-critical applications.
- With lowest latency. Delivering at sub-millisecond latency from gigabytes to petabytes predictably.2
- With extreme reliability. Globally distributed data presents challenges for every data platform, but Aerospike handles it while delivering five-nines (99.999%) uptime.3
- With a smaller footprint. Aerospike users can typically reduce their server or cloud footprint by up to 80 percent.
The Aerospike platform with its hybrid memory architecture and flash optimized storage features, delivers even more when running on HPE Superdome Flex servers, and we’ve partnered together to deliver numerous solutions for financial services and other industries.
Large, shared memory advantages
The complementary architectures of Aerospike and HPE Superdome Flex servers make them ideal for addressing the challenges faced by FSIs, bringing higher performance and availability than other architectures. Aerospike and HPE Superdome Flex also offer excellent scalability to handle the “explosion in the amount of data” generated in the financial services industry.
As discussed in a recent HPE Community blog, large-scale AI projects and other data-intensive workloads benefit hugely from having access to large, shared memory resources. When large and complex datasets can be stored entirely in shared memory, with no need to break them up and re-assemble them, they run with greater speed, efficiency, and reliability.
Superdome Flex brings similar advantages to financial services workloads on Aerospike. The joint solution delivers performance where legacy infrastructure cannot meet SLAs; scalability to handle the explosion in FSI data generation; low latency to deliver fast insights; TCO reductions to address big data challenges; and high availability with the unique RAS features of Superdome Flex family.
Ideal for AI, ML, and fraud detection
The combination of HPE Superdome Flex and Aerospike also addresses data access needs for key financial services use cases.
- In fraud detection, FSIs can deploy a single node capable of processing more than 8.7 million operations/second. Fraud calculations are completed faster, with 30x faster adherence to SLAs. Fraud calculations can also include more attributes, helping you to reduce false positives. All this can enable you to detect, prevent, and mitigate fraud in real-time, so you can make significant cost savings.
- In AI and ML, FSIs can build efficient, low-cost feature stores that integrate readily with popular ML tools (such as Spark, Kafka, and Presto) and legacy infrastructures. Thanks to the massive parallelism of Aerospike and the large memory of Superdome Flex, you can reduce training time, re-train more often, and maximize ROI. And because Aerospike works with distributed data where it resides, in multiple clouds and at the edge, you can eliminate compliance headaches by conducting in-place data exploration.
Joint solution capabilities
To test the solution’s capabilities at scale, Aerospike and HPE engineering teams ran 50 billion key value benchmarks with 25 billion unique key values on one single HPE Superdome Flex. Comparing that simplified setup to a typical scale‑up Aerospike environment of 60 to 100 servers is easy to see the benefits. The single‑system HPE Superdome Flex significantly simplifies management and with its vast RAS features set, increases reliability for the environment.
As part of the tests, the teams running these benchmarks simulated a CPU failure in the environment; thanks to the Superdome Flex extensive RAS capabilities, the system continued to run and picked up the additional load from the “failed” CPU. The CPU was then brought back, as the system continued to run the workload; after rebalancing the workload, performance went back up.
You can learn more in our joint brochure on the Aerospike and Superdome Flex solutions. In it, former HPE Chief Architect of AI Big Data Solutions Theresa Melvin comments that “Aerospike is second to none for ingesting and persisting millions of events per second… it allows me to do near-instantaneous machine learning on the data as it lands.”
These capabilities are also useful for building a 360-degree customer view, based on real-time access to customer data from multiple sources.
Learn more
Choosing the right investments to combat fraud, become more competitive in the AI and ML space, and modernize infrastructure isn’t easy. To learn more about how you can add value to your business with the complementary Aerospike and HPE Superdome Flex architectures and understand other use cases, click below.
- Check out the 2-page solution brief
- Download the brochure
- Contact an HPE representative
Diana has spent the past 24 years working with the technologies that power the world’s most demanding IT environments and is interested in how solutions based on those technologies impact the business. A native from Colombia, Diana holds an MBA from Georgetown University and has held a variety of regional and global roles with HPE in the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
[1] Aerospike, see https://aerospike.com/products/benefits/predictable-performance/
[2] Aerospike (2022) https://aerospike.com/customers/airtel/
[3] Deloitte (2021). 2022 banking and capital markets outlook
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