---
title: "One platform for trading, accounts and reporting"
url: "https://www.iopstor.com/case-studies/finance-trading"
type: "Case Studies"
published: "2026-09-03"
updated: "2026-10-15"
description: "Nine servers, one per application, became fourteen virtual machines on two hosts and one IOPStor ZFS array, with hourly snapshots and a third less power."
---

# One platform for trading, accounts and reporting

Nine servers, one per application, became fourteen virtual machines on two hosts and one IOPStor ZFS array, with hourly snapshots and a third less power.

## Challenge

Every application had a server of its own. Trading, accounting, the reporting database and the domain controller sat on hardware bought in different years, and the oldest were out of warranty with no spare on the shelf. A failure meant a day lost. Backups ran to a USB disk that somebody had to remember to swap.

## Solution

IOPStor consolidated the lot onto VMware running against an IOPStor ZFS array. Nine physical servers became fourteen virtual machines on two hosts, with the array serving them over 10G. Snapshots run hourly and replicate to a second appliance at the firm's office. The migration was done over three weekends, with no weekday downtime.

## Results

Nine boxes came down to two hosts and one array. A machine now rolls back from a snapshot in minutes rather than being rebuilt over a day, and the whole estate is one console instead of one per machine. Power draw fell by just over a third. The platform was bought once, with no licence renewal on the storage.

## What we Deployed?

- VMware, on two hosts.

- IOPStor ZFS array, served over 10G
- Snapshots every hour
- Offsite Backup Server Synced Daily.

## Have a similar workload?

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## All Case Studies

- [A post-production company grows from 8 people to 100 on IOPStor storage](/case-studies/a-post-production-company-grows-from-8-people-to-100-on-iopstor-storage.md): Eight people passing files from hand to hand became a hundred across video editing, 3D and After Effects, working from IOPStor storage that gives each department its own pool and its own bandwidth.
- [After its 100 TB RAID failed, a hospital chose IOPStor for storage it can rely on](/case-studies/after-its-100-tb-raid-failed-a-hospital-chose-iopstor-for-storage-it-can-rely-on.md): The hospital's 100 TB RAID failed, and the company that supplied it would not repair it. IOPStor replaced it with a 100 TB NAS and a single compute node, protected by snapshots and a disaster-recovery system that keeps a copy offsite in the cloud.
- [Six branches and a hundred users on one IOPStor hyper-converged system](/case-studies/six-branches-and-a-hundred-users-on-one-iopstor-hyper-converged-system.md): A manufacturer whose branches each held their own copy of the data now runs six sites on a single IOPStor hyper-converged system, with every employee working inside it through VMware Horizon.