Feature story: Milliseconds count at CME Group - HP NonStop

F eature story
Milliseconds
count
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CME
Cash-Set
GLOBEX
OP

CME Group achieves
outstanding throughput
and response time with HP
Integrity NonStop platform
TThe financial exchange marketplace is going
crazy. Geopolitical maneuvering, rising energy
costs, interest rate fluctuations, international
economics, credit tightening, climate-related
influences, central bank policies, and variations
in currency values are just a few of the
culprits. More than ever, this is an industry
in which milliseconds count and system
failure is unthinkable.
tled
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“This is a business in which we do everything we
can to avoid any downtime at all, and we’ve been
incredibly successful at operating a high-reliability,
stable environment. The Integrity NonStop system
plays a key role in this success.”
John Hart, managing director of Technology Engineering, CME Group
CME Group, a CME/Chicago Board of Trade
Company, is right in the middle of the exciting
and dynamic financial exchange environment. “We
are at the center, providing liquid markets on
an international basis,” said John Hart, managing
director of Technology Engineering at CME
Group. As the world’s largest and most diverse
derivatives exchange, CME Group offers products
in every major asset class—including agriculture,
livestock, equity indexes, foreign exchange, and
interest rates—traded via the firm’s Globex electronic
trading platform and traditional open-outcry
markets. To meet its stringent requirements for
performance and reliability, CME Group entrusts
Globex to the HP Integrity NonStop server.
Transaction volume explodes
Among the raft of challenges facing any major
player in today’s frenetic exchange market, Hart puts
growth at the top of the list. “The biggest challenge
by far is managing the growth in order volume,” he
said. “Our combined systems typically experience
a 300 to 400 percent increase in transactions on
an annual basis, and it’s not uncommon to receive
1.2 billion orders in a single week.”
The booming transaction volume is due partly
to expansion in the scope of CME Group activities.
In addition, as the percentage of electronically
handled trades continues to rise, customers can
generate even more information for the company
to process. More than 80 percent of CME Group
trades are now electronic, from more than 80 countries
around the world.
To handle this extraordinary growth, CME Group
makes system performance a priority. “We have
continuously sped up our systems,” said Hart. “This
is a critical point for our industry and our business,
because we want to have the fastest and most reliable
systems in order to provide truly open and
liquid markets. We do everything we can to ensure
that the systems here can respond as quickly as
possible—not only during normal times, but also
when events cause significant movement in the
financial marketplace. We need the capacity to
process that transaction load in a very timely and
reliable fashion.”
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First in North America
CME Group was an early adopter of Integrity
NonStop technology, and it was also the first enterprise
in North America to put the system into production.
Said Hart: “Very shortly after bringing up
our first test unit, we made the decision to move
100 percent of our futures match engine production
to the Integrity NonStop platform. We felt this
approach would result in optimal performance, and
we have not been disappointed.”
Transaction response time is critical to CME
Group. “We want to process every trade in as few
milliseconds as possible, while maintaining enough
system capacity to meet the needs of a volatile
market,” Hart continued. “When an event causes
the markets to move quickly, we need consistent
performance even under heavy load. We moved to
the Integrity NonStop platform because it gave us
much better response and dramatically improved
scalability.” CME Group has 14 Integrity NonStop
NS16000 servers for production—mostly in Triple
Modular Redundancy (TMR) configuration—along
with two Integrity NonStop NS1000 servers for test
and development, for a total of 240 processors.
CME Group saw a dramatic improvement in
response time with the new system: Latency immediately
dropped 35 percent, to less than 50 milliseconds.
Subsequent tuning has made the numbers
even better. “Today we are under 20 milliseconds,”
said Hart. “Probably our busiest engine is somewhere
around 15 to 17 milliseconds, depending on
the time and the load on the system.”
“Our combined systems
typically experience a
300 to 400 percent increase
in transactions on an annual
basis, and it’s not uncommon
to receive 1.2 billion orders in
a single week.”
John Hart, managing director of Technology
Engineering, CME Group
HP storage solution keeps up
CME Group has been using HP StorageWorks XP disk
arrays since before they were officially a product,
according to John Hart, managing director of Technology
Engineering at CME Group. “As with the Intel Itanium
processor–based Integrity NonStop platform, we were
early adopters with the StorageWorks XP disk array as
well,” he said. “XP was critical to us, because we were
able to improve the performance of the system that
much more by reducing—and in some cases eliminating—
latency caused by disk I/O. Anything that was in the path
of the transaction was moved from a physical spinning
disk over to the XP disk array.”
The StorageWorks XP disk array is an enterprise-class
storage system that delivers state-of-the-art reliability
and always-on availability for mission-critical applications,
where downtime is not an option. Complete redundancy
throughout the architecture provides no single
point of failure, and nondisruptive online upgrades ensure
that data is always available. Additionally, the XP disk
array’s best-in-class software decreases the costs and
complexities of data management.
“The vast majority of what we do with the StorageWorks
XP disk array is served out of memory cache in the XP
itself, so it removes many of the limitations of physical
disk,” continued Hart. “In addition, it gives us the ability
to respond and react more quickly to changes in the
market; for instance, if a particular product family grows
very rapidly, we can quickly allocate more space to it
using the XP array because it’s a very large virtual disk.
In concert with the Integrity NonStop platform, this storage
solution helps us adapt quickly and effectively to the
constantly changing conditions that define our industry.”
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Over the past few years, CME Group has seen
ever-greater use of electronic trading systems, with
a computer on the other end of the line sending
orders into the Globex system. “The faster we
make our system, the more quickly these computers
can send orders into it,” said Hart. “Having
that lower latency not only allows us to respond
more quickly for our customer base, but it also
means we can process more transactions in a given
amount of time.”
Trillions on the move
Continuous availability is equally critical. “Suffice
it to say that when you’re moving $6 trillion in
a single day, downtime is expensive,” said Hart.
“This is a business in which we do everything we
can to avoid any downtime at all, and we’ve been
incredibly successful at operating a high-reliability,
stable environment. The Integrity NonStop system
plays a key role in this success. It’s part of a very
large picture based on providing the most reliable
systems possible on a cost-effective basis for our
customers.”
The flexibility of the Integrity NonStop platform is
evident in the innovative system configuration that
CME Group has developed for its critical Globex
system. “We use the Integrity NonStop server in
the most critical portion of our environment, where
the actual trade match is made,” said Hart. “On the
front end, thousands of Linux servers do all the
preliminary work before that trade match occurs.
By combining the strengths of Integrity NonStop
technology and commodity servers, we have been
able to meet our performance, cost, and reliability
goals extremely well.”
HP service and support match the quality of the
platform, according to Hart. “I think the service
has been top-notch,” he said. “It has definitely met
our expectations, and those expectations are very
high. On the more strategic side of professional
services, CME Group has worked side by side with
HP on numerous projects, focused primarily on
increasing the performance and scalability of the
system. HP is truly a partner for CME Group, and
that’s saying a lot.”
Blades: The next step
In keeping with its leadership role in technology
innovation, CME Group is once again an
early adopter—this time for the groundbreaking
HP Integrity NonStop BladeSystem platform. “We’re
looking for performance,” said Hart. “Our expectation
of the blade environment, due to its general
nature, is that we’ll be able to take advantage of
faster processing speeds and immediately apply that
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to the Globex platform. We expect to see immediate
improvement in throughput and response time,
with additional gains as the system is tuned. The
blade environment is also more compact; it will
use less space in our data center, and space is a
premium for us.” As an additional benefit, Hart
notes that the Integrity NonStop BladeSystem platform
will consume less power per transaction than
earlier-generation Integrity NonStop systems.
Hart sees the Integrity NonStop BladeSystem as
the logical evolution of NonStop technology. “I’m
very happy to see that the platform is moving to utilize
a blade chassis,” he said. “In the past, NonStop
servers were criticized for being proprietary. Over
time, the platform has become more mainstream
in its implementation and use of components,
while retaining the benefits of the NonStop system
philosophy. So in a sense it’s a testament to the
c-Class blades chassis itself—the fact that HP has
developed a blade center for general use with
sufficient built-in reliability to house an Integrity
NonStop BladeSystem. That is quite an impressive
achievement.”
Change is the byword at CME Group. “We have
a dynamic environment in which our load literally
changes minute to minute,” said Hart. “With
the Integrity NonStop platform, we can allocate
resources quickly to respond to those increased
needs. The platform gives us the flexibility to adapt
for better business outcomes.”
For Hart, the overriding benefit of the Integrity
NonStop platform is the reliability of the Globex
electronic trading environment. “This is where we
do our most critical processing,” he concluded. “We
do it on this platform because we are looking for
the highest reliability possible: at the point where
we do the trade match.
“Our customers know that we have a highly
reliable system. It is a combination of reliable
platform technology, overall system architecture,
and exceptionally careful execution, even under
substantial load. The truth of the matter is, an
electronic trading system that cannot handle the
transaction load when the market is volatile can
result in risk for the customers using it. This is
not something we have to worry about with our
Integrity NonStop system.” ◆
“We’re looking for performance.
Our expectation of the
blade environment is that we’ll
be able to take advantage of
faster processing speeds …
The blade environment is also
more compact; it will use less
space in our data center, and
space is a premium for us.”
John Hart, managing director of Technology
Engineering, CME Group
JOHN K. HART is managing director
of Technology Engineering for
CME Group, responsible for the
company’s technical infrastructure
and support systems. He also oversees CME’s
information security area. Hart has held a variety
of technology positions since joining CME in 1996,
including senior director of Network Engineering
and director of Network Services.
Hart’s expertise in engineering and network
technology comes from more than 20 years of
experience. Before joining CME, Hart managed network
services for First Options, a Chicago clearing
firm. Other positions he has held include senior
network analyst for the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation and director of Technology
Integration for Fossett Securities Corporation.
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