SAKONNET - 2008 JBOSS INNOVATION AWARD WINNER

Category: Migration
Winner: Sakonnet
Submitted by: David Renton, Vice President, Product Delivery at Sakonnet
Industry: Oil and Gas
Geography: New York, London, Rio de Janeiro

Overview
Used JBoss Application Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to develop a scalable, performance-driving, well-supported solution that provided ease-of-use, cost savings, and transparency for Sakonnet’s energy-trading solutions. With JBoss Application Server, Sakonnet discovered a solution that combined low-cost, quality software and reliable support to fit into its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) strategy of frequent application upgrades and top-notch support.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Sakonnet Technology, dedicated to excellence in trading solutions for wholesale energy markets, is a private company that was started by JPMorgan technologists in 1999. The company focuses on energy trading and risk management systems under the Software as a Service (SaaS) model for utilities, banks, hedge funds, and commercial and industrial companies that are heavy consumers of power./p>

Sakonnet’s main offering is the energy-trading application, Xenon®. Xenon is the ideal platform for running a profitable, tightly-controlled trading operation. It allows clients to set their processes and controls at every stage, from pre-trade analysis to final settlement. The application covers trades in power, natural gas, crude oil, refined products, coal, and emissions credits.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

The challenge for companies trading in energy markets is handling the vast quantity of data that arises from transactions combined with traders’ reporting needs. There is a tension between the amount of data and the near realtime speed with which traders need consolidated reports to take further actions in the markets. A single trade in the power market may require the system to capture a distinct price and volume for every 15-minute period for the next year, and then turn around and report on position and risk in a matter of seconds. Timely reporting and suitable follow-on actions are a key difference in making profit and avoiding loss in fast-moving markets.

What was the desired solution?

As we developed the newest version of our application, Xenon 5.1, we were focused on scalability and performance and needed a solution that could help deliver these benefits. Originally, the application ran on Weblogic technology. With the vast amount of data processing involved in energy trading, we required a large number of application servers and suffered heavy licensing fees associated with our previous Weblogic solution.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss in the end.

When looking for a solution that would fit our scalability, performance-enhancing and cost-effective requirements, we looked toward open source solutions because we knew we could find the reliability and low cost that we desired. We decided to migrate to JBoss technology because we saw a solution that combined the transparency, which would provide us with top-level operational availability, and the same functionality from a licensing perspective, but with a much lowered cost. The quality of the software, the support available for the software, the performance data, and the ease of deployment were also key factors in our decision to migrate from Weblogic to JBoss.

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

Once we migrated to JBoss Application Server in 2002, we added compute server clusters, today known as grid computing, to our n-tier J2EE application for better scalability, while leveraging our existing infrastructure. We paid one licensing fee and were able to utilize JBoss solutions on scores of machines, avoiding a per-CPU cost model.

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

• JBoss Application Server provided us with lowered costs, mainly through third-party licensing costs.
• We’ve saved a lot of development time with the combination of JBoss Hibernate, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Oracle because the combination provided us with the ability to quickly understand and resolve any issues that arose during our platform migration.
• 24×7x365 availability is less costly to maintain because of the transparency inherent in JBoss’ open source technology. With transparency, we are able to deal with any issues in and take immediate corrective action to minimize the impact to our clients.
• We’ve experienced the benefits of the speed and efficiency of the Red Hat and JBoss support teams, in comparison to other vendors.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

Our IT architecture solution includes 30 HP Blade Servers utilizing Sun JVM 1.4.2 and JBoss Application Server 3.2 on Windows. We also use Oracle databases running in a cluster on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.1 on Dell hardware with EMC. For our migration, our CTO played the role of architect and guided the technology.

For the future, we plan to additionally migrate to JBoss ESB and we’re currently in the early stages of exploring JBoss Rules. We also hope to incorporate a monitoring tool like JBoss Operation Network.

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

We used migration consulting when deploying JBoss solutions and had a very positive experience. While our CTO acted as the architect, we utilized JBoss consulting for a few months during the migration. Now, we use 24×7 enterprise-level support and have found that any questions we may have are easily answered by knowledgeable support staff. Our experience with Red Hat and JBoss support has been excellent. After several months in production, we ran into an obscure cluster problem and were able to immediately get the assistance of the senior developer from JBoss to help us understand the issues. That level of expertise truly made a difference for our system. We also ran into several Oracle issues while porting our application. Once the problem was identified, Oracle turned around a patch for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in four days. Our development team currently develops on Windows desktops and the same patch that we had for Red Hat Enterprise Linux would only be available for Windows in the next release of Oracle.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

Our advice to companies in our industry with the same challenge of needing a reliable, scalable, and affordable solution is to explore open source, specifically Red Hat and JBoss solutions, because this technology is 24×7 stable, provides a full feature set, can be developed on quickly, and maintained with less cost. We’ve saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and even more in development time.

This entry was posted under Oil and Gas, Latin America, Dell, EMEA, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, North America, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Consulting, Global Support Services, JBoss Innovation Awards, BEA WebLogic, Microsoft Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.