BlackRock’s Aladdin platform achieves cutting edge of high performance with Azure Ultra Disk Storage

With its customers fully migrated to Azure managed disks, BlackRock needed an extremely high-performance solution for its own internal Aladdin instance.

Azure Ultra Disk Storage, M-series Virtual Machines, and Virtual Machine Scale Sets collectively fulfill the company’s needs for high throughput, consistent and predictable low-latency storage as well as high scalability and availability.

Since migration, BlackRock’s Aladdin saw its highest trading day ever, and Ultra Disk passed the test with flying colors.

BlackRock is a global asset manager and technology provider—helping more and more people experience financial well-being.

The firm’s investment technology platform, Aladdin, which is used both internally and by other asset managers, wealth managers, asset owners, asset servicers, corporates (including Microsoft Treasury), and central banks—unifies the investment management process, giving institutional investors the ability to seamlessly manage assets, performance, and risk across markets.

For Randall Fradin, BlackRock Tech Fellow and Head of the Cloud Managed Services group for Aladdin, being in a category of one as the leading asset management firm creates unique technology challenges. One such challenge was an ever-increasing need to scale out Aladdin’s footprint. A few years ago, BlackRock made the decision to migrate the Aladdin platform to Azure to access innovative technology and support scalability and flexibility for its clients. The company approached the migration methodically, moving one client at a time: In fact, Microsoft corporate treasury was the first Aladdin instance to migrate.

As BlackRock prepared to migrate its internal Aladdin instance, the team recognized the need to maximize performance to handle the sizable database and reduce latency. With Aladdin playing a critical role in helping clients respond to shifting markets and manage portfolios with agility, ensuring low-latency, high-reliability performance was essential. By moving to Azure, BlackRock is better positioned to deliver consistent, responsive experiences to its clients around the world—at any moment.

“We had to engineer a solution that allowed us to run extremely high-performance databases in Azure,” says Britt Ewen, Managing Director Head of BlackRock’s global database team for Aladdin. “We have a very important database at the heart of Aladdin with extremely tight latency requirements.”

Azure made an advantageous offer as a cloud partner: a combination of certified VMs, ultra-low-latency disk storage, and high-performance architecture, purpose-built for workloads like Aladdin.

BlackRock was very familiar with the disk offerings on Azure, and knew that Azure Ultra Disk Storage would be able to support their internal Aladdin use case. Ultra Disk offers high throughput, high IOPS (input/output operations per second) and consistent and predictable low-latency storage, all with high availability and built-in redundancy.

“Now that we’re on Azure, we have a springboard to unlock adoption of cloud-managed services to be able to engineer and operate at greater scale and adopt innovative technologies.”

Randall Fradin, Head of Cloud Managed Services and Platform Engineering, BlackRock

The BlackRock and Microsoft teams worked together to build a large test environment and a sophisticated simulation of the heaviest trading days in Aladdin, an end-to-end scenario covering the entire investment lifecycle. They also moved the production environment into and back out of Azure more than 10 times over the course of a year to vet every component of the system. Ultra Disk delivered from the very first test—and thanks to months of rigorous simulations, migration day was, as Fradin proudly puts it, “quiet and boring.” Since that migration, BlackRock had its highest trading volume day ever; Aladdin running on Azure passed the test with flying colors, according to Eli Hamburger, Blackrock Technical Fellow and Head of Infrastructure Hosting.

BlackRock initially migrated to Mv2 Red Hat Enterprise Linux based Virtual Machines (VMs) and is now in the process of migrating to Mv3s. Ewen says one of the big advantages of being on Azure is the ability to migrate on to the newest and fastest processors as they’re available.

“We won’t have to put out a capital expense, don’t have to do the engineering of the underlying platform and can simply do a Terraform deployment to update the estate,” he says.

With many database servers inside the BlackRock Aladdin environment, Virtual Machine Scale Sets and availability zones are enabling resilience and ensuring there will be minimal to no impact if something were to go wrong, Hamburger says. Availability zones and VM scale sets not only ensure continuity—they give BlackRock the confidence to scale without hesitation.

BlackRock is now adopting several additional Azure services as it looks to improve Aladdin’s architecture. It is adopting Azure SQL database, including the hyperscale service tier and SQL elastic pools, to modernize its databases. The organization is also eyeing wider adoption of Azure Kubernetes Service, which it’s already using quite heavily, and is excited about potentially leveraging Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Cache for Redis. The organization is also thrilled about the AI capabilities on Azure, via Azure Machine Learning, Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI.

“Now that we’re on Azure, we have a springboard to unlock adoption of cloud-managed services to be able to engineer and operate at greater scale and adopt innovative technologies,” Fradin says.

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