IT for the investment ecosystem

    The Moscow Exchange is not only a multifunctional platform for trading stocks, bonds, currency, goods and other instruments, but also a company with developed IT infrastructure. About how its fault tolerance is provided, - Sergey Shelyagin, Managing Director for the Development of Exchange Information and Technological Services of the Moscow Exchange.

    Key indicator - stability


    - What makes up the quality of services that the Moscow Exchange provides to investors, bidders in different markets?

    - Firstly, the quality of services is determined by the breadth of opportunities for exchange customers to raise capital on our site, to invest in different classes of assets, to hedge risks. Secondly, of course, the stability and uninterrupted operation of the trading and clearing platforms of the exchange. And, finally, the time during which the problems that sometimes arise in the operation of any complex technological site are eliminated.

    - What are the requirements for the quality of services and the state of IT infrastructure for the Moscow Exchange?

    - There are no formal requirements, but the exchange is the center of the country's financial infrastructure and the market has high expectations regarding the reliability, speed and throughput of our systems. According to the results of the last five years, the Moscow Exchange has an average accessibility indicator of 99.97%. The response time of trading and clearing platforms is 300 μs, which corresponds to the performance of the world's leading exchanges. According to the latest testing, the throughput of trading systems is from 38 thousand to 110 thousand transactions per second, depending on the market. We obligatorily coordinate all significant IT innovations with a committee consisting of representatives of our clients - brokers and banks. Any exchange is a complex IT infrastructure. Moscow Exchange technologies include not only trading systems, as on most other exchanges,

    - Can the Moscow Exchange compete in terms of its technological equipment with leading exchange platforms?

    - We not only can, but also compete with them in real time for trading volumes. In particular, our share in the volume of trading in shares of listed companies in Moscow and London has grown significantly over the past few years and reached 63%. We have created a global infrastructure for connecting to the Moscow Exchange. Using various technologies, they organized a colocation of the participants' systems in the immediate vicinity of the trading systems, organized an extensive network of communication channels so that in the cities of our country, and in London, New York and Frankfurt, it was possible to connect to the exchange's trading systems easily and quickly. In general, compared with other exchanges, we have a wider range of network solutions. We take into account that many financial institutions cannot afford serious infrastructure costs, therefore we widely use Internet connections, and traffic aggregation through leading telecom operators instead of point-to-point connections. That is, we provide many opportunities for companies with any infrastructure and any budget.

    - What steps have already been taken to increase the resiliency of technology platforms?

    - The Exchange’s efforts are focused on three strategic programs:

    modernization of the information architecture, the main element of which is the separation of platforms into clearing and trading modules;
    a hardware fleet upgrade program, the purpose of which is to ensure that the maximum age of server hardware is no more than three years;
    moving the core manufacturing infrastructure to a new DataSpace data center that meets Uptime Institute Tier III Gold resiliency.
    The exchange is making every effort to improve the quality of the software product: a system of static code analysis has been introduced, the practice of proofreading code has been introduced (code reviews), the testing process has been formalized and expanded.

    Techniques to prevent accidental equipment breakdowns do not exist. But there are a number of ways to compensate for hardware failures. Most of them are implemented on the exchange: from fully automatic “hot” backup to well-established processes of manual switching to a backup data center.

    Modern computer networks used by the exchange have the ability to automatically reconfigure depending on the state of individual elements of the network infrastructure: links, switches, routers. This year the exchange switched to a new (“flat”) network topology. Such a network allows, on the one hand, to significantly increase throughput, and on the other, to reduce the likelihood of phenomena such as a network storm, or to limit its spread.

    “DataSpace is a reliable partner providing a fault-tolerant and secure environment for critical IT assets of Russian and foreign companies. Every year, an increasing number of customers selects external data center service providers, as this allows them to meet the increasingly stringent requirements for reliability and security and at the same time is more profitable from an economic and operational point of view. The Moscow Exchange is one of these companies: the DataSpace data center is becoming the main data processing center for the trading and clearing platforms of the Moscow Exchange. We are interested in long-term partnerships and hope that our cooperation with the Moscow Exchange will serve as an excellent example for the further development of the Russian data center market. ”

    Sergey Rasskazov, President, CEO of DataSpace

    To a new level of reliability


    - How will the move to the new data center affect the smooth functioning of the trading and clearing platforms of the Moscow Exchange?

    - Improving the resiliency of our IT infrastructure was one of the main goals of changing the main data center. And in this sense, at DataSpace data center, which at the time of choice, in 2014, was the only commercial data center in Russia and continental Europe and the fifth in the world to undergo a full certification cycle for compliance with Uptime Institute Tier III standards, we place large hopes. From November, it will become the main data center of the Moscow Exchange.

    - Has the Moscow Exchange not considered the opportunity to build its own data center?

    - It was one of the options, but we were stopped by the need for significant capital costs. There are not many exchanges in the world that have their own data center. On the contrary, a number of exchanges from the top 30 in the technical policy prescribed that they would never build their own data center. After analyzing the situation, we came to the conclusion that renting several rooms in a commercial data center with a high level of reliability is more profitable: this way we can manage transaction costs.

    Everything for customers


    - What is the new main data center?

    - We rented two halls in the DataSpace data center: one for bidders, the other for hosting our trading and clearing systems, with a capacity of 360 kW each, and seriously invested in their equipment. The first reviews of our Russian and foreign brokers who have already installed their equipment in the client room are very positive - both about the quality of the racks, and about the solutions for wiring cables, and about security systems.

    “Modern social and economic trends dictate an unambiguous requirement for the financial world - to promptly and flexibly offer individual sets of client services at minimal cost. Outsourcing of data centers is an economically rational solution to meet this requirement - there are no capital costs for an engineering asset non-core for a fintech company, and operating costs for outsourcing are allocated to the cost of the entire portfolio of services. At the same time, the benefit-cost ratio (BCR) of such a partnership is very high: DataSpace provides one of the best service levels in the industry at a competitive price, physical security of the facility and the absence of legal and financial risks. ”

    Oleg Pismensky, Vice President, Commercial Director, DataSpace

    - And how many customers at the Moscow Exchange are interested in placing their equipment in the DataSpace data center?

    - Over 50 clients use the colocation service with us. Among them there are small companies, and even several students with a good mathematical base, and large brokers who make a setup clone in the DataSpace data center and trade in London, New York, and Hong Kong. So that different customers can occupy in the engine room from one unit in a rack to several racks. At the same time, it is from customers whose equipment is in close proximity to our trading cores, the so-called high-frequency traders, that today 80–90% of applications are received in our trading systems.

    -Why do such bidders need to bring their equipment as close as possible to the technological platforms of the Moscow Exchange?

    - Proximity to the exchange servers provides a serious gain in speed, which is very important, because with high-frequency trading, the bill goes not even in milliseconds, but in microseconds, tens of microseconds. This is exactly what traders need in order to get market data, make a decision and place an order. And our task is to provide them with such an opportunity.

    - Will the DataSpace company deal with the operation of the new data center of the Moscow Exchange?

    - They solve engineering problems defined in the Service Level Agreement (SLA): they provide uninterrupted power supply and cooling, as well as facility security, provide customer support and emergency services. In turn, the Moscow Exchange has a service of duty engineers who service equipment directly in the server room, as well as several technical services that support the operation of our main data center at the network level, application systems and customer integration level.

    - What strategic objectives of the Moscow Exchange should the new data center help solve?

    - In the context under discussion, the exchange has several strategic objectives. Firstly, to promote the efficiency of our customers in the markets. The more convenient and technologically advanced their access to exchange markets is, the greater the potential volume of their operations. Secondly, to attract new international investors to the Russian market, and here the quality of our IT infrastructure is one of the most important arguments.

    Based on materials from iksmedia.ru

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