Case Study: Optioning Performance

How do you maintain peak performance on a mission-critical, all-electronic options trading platform while preparing for the transition to a new one? When you're a leading global options exchange and your customers are highly attuned to performance, that's a high-stakes challenge. To meet it, technology leaders at the International Securities Exchange (ISE) turned to the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series. They say the Intel processor delivers a twofold performance improvement that is keeping ISE on the leading edge of performance and providing headroom to carry the company and its members into the future.

Challenges

• Staying ahead of the pack. ISE needed to continue improving performance on its existing trading platform while preparing to unveil a next-generation trading system in late 2010. With increasing quote traffic and rising system demands, ISE faced steep costs to expand the existing solution.

Solutions

• Transition to the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series. Impressed with the performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, ISE has migrated key elements of its trading platform from HP Integrity servers running OpenVMS to HP ProLiant BL460 G6 servers with the new Intel® Xeon® processor and Red Hat Linux. The solution also includes Intel® LAN adapters for added throughput.