Data Center in a Cloud

Background

In addition to capital markets consulting and financial management services, Cooper River Financial develops financial applications that help banks work better. A start-up, Cooper River has grown from 0 to 3 mortgage banks and has two lending relationships with capital partners in its 1st year, providing $120-160 mm in liquidity for mortgage lending per month with capacity to reach $500 mm in liquidity per month. Cooper River’s customers are mortgage banks that have a 100+ mm lending pipeline per month and are looking to directly sell to the GSEs.

One of their key development initiatives is an online mortgage financing system that takes the funding process from loan origination all the way to investor funding, fully electronically. Known as eWarehouse® lending and eMortgage processing, these applications help financial institutions better manage cash flow while remaining flexible in financing their own core business operations.

Challenge

Cooper River CTO Jim Schott analyzed the relative merits of bringing all IT infrastructure in-house vs. outsourcing to a trusted partner as he built the infrastructure for this startup. Top on his list of requirements was that the solution had to be a credible plan that permitted Cooper River to grow IT in pace with sales while not weighing down the bottom line.

Specifically, Cooper River needed an IT infrastructure for development and test, with an architecture approach that uses virtualization to provide an elastic infrastructure to grow and shrink with operational demand. Additionally, it had to be redundant and provide a high-cost benefit solution by having Disaster Recovery redundancy built in to a geographically balanced system.

After evaluating both the internal and outsourced options, Cooper River chose Hosting.com.

Solution

Working with Cooper River, Hosting.com built a 3-tier Cloud Enterprise application stack leveraging a Virtual Machine (VM) for the presentation layer, a VM for the application layer and a VM for the database. The production environment resides in the Newark Data Center with server replication failover to an identical environment in the Denver Data Center. The 3-tier architecture of the system permits horizontal expansion in the presentation and application layers and the database layer can expand and contract by adding and removing memory and CPU and an option for a physical server(s). It’s a highly available system that maximizes all assets across the architecture.

In addition, in the Newark Data Center Cooper River has a complete parallel application stack consisting of 3 VMs dedicated to User Acceptance Testing (UAT). The Cooper River application manages the connection string between the application layer and the database using a single common hostname across all 3 environments. Local host files on the application servers point to the appropriate database server.

Cooper River uses the Hosting.com Customer Portal to monitor system health and to schedule server re-boots. In the near future they plan to use the virtual machine parking features; cloning is a major tool that will to support their ability to scale horizontally within the web and application layer. Each instance of these tier servers would be a clone of the existing tier server.

Results

Cooper River has a resilient and flexible infrastructure that allows elastic deployment for scaling up and down quickly, in sites that are secure and monitored, and with knowledgeable support staff available around the clock. The redundancy across geographically-dispersed data centers gives them the high availability and DR capabilities they required with thin client support of Business Continuity.

CTO Schott notes that it’s always proper to “try the lowest cost first. With Hosting.com, we estimate our costs to be 25% less over a 5 year run rate than if managed internally. Not only that--with the Customer Portal, our developers can react to “complaint” driven performance indicators and gear up in a half hour, reconfiguring to new states quickly.”

He added that, “If a catastrophe occurred, like the building caught fire, we could come up in a hotel room and keep development on track.”