Case study: building a 21st century trading floor

Finance firms in the City of London face severe constraints on their IT infrastructure, with hundreds of demanding users often crammed into a relatively small space, plus the need to keep company data secure at all cost.

Following a number of mergers, Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International (MUSI) found itself with around 700 staff at its Broadgate head office, about 200 of whom were traders using multiple screens for dealing in the debt, equity-linked and derivatives markets.

Running out of space and needing to replace its ageing kit, the company turned to Dell to help build a new state-of-the art environment. The solution was to install Dell PowerEdge 1955 blade servers in two secure rooms adjacent to the trading floor, linked to a console on each trader’s desk.

“With the new floor, we decided to look closely at power and cooling, and the guys had to have UPS backup. Some of them were using two or three PCs each, and this made cable management a problem as well,” said Simon Yiakoumi, director of IT operations at MUSI.

Using blades in place of conventional workstations has given the firm much greater flexibility when moving or adding users. “We’ve been able to create a PC image and operate pools of blades, so we can have a base build ready whenever a new guy arrives,” Yiakoumi said. The performance of the blades has led to a reduction in user downtime, and the hardware is safe from tampering inside the secure datacentres, he added.

Because of the multi-screen requirement of its users, MUSI settled on a high-performance solution from Amulet Hotkey to provide the desktop console. The DeTwo box on each trader’s desk provides a PCI slot for a graphics card, in this case a Matrox G450 supporting up to four screens, plus USB, keyboard and mouse ports. It links back to the blade racks via standard Cat 5 cabling.

This architecture restricts the distance between console and blade to no more than 100m. While an IP-based solution using a remote desktop protocol would allow for greater flexibility, such products did not provide support for multiple screens at the time MUSI was building its new trading floor. Yiakoumi said the company is satisfied with the solution it has deployed.

“Performance is fantastic, and if we need to move someone, we can simply change the cable at the blade rack,” Yiakoumi said, adding that he was working with Amulet to develop a switching solution to avoid the need to physically swap connections. The current architecture will be sufficient for at least the next 18 to 24 months, he estimated, after which the firm may start looking at ways of having a remote datacentre located off-site.

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