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Raritan IP-ReachTM TR-Series Saves the Day for Financial Technology Company
Headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, NYFIX
develops and markets advanced electronic trading
systems to brokerage firms, international banks and
global exchanges trading in equities and derivative
instruments. The Company's NYFIX Network enables
users to electronically communicate trade data among
the buy-side, sell-side, and exchange floor environments.
Nearly 50 percent of the companies represented on the
New York Stock Exchange floor are using the NYFIX
wall-mounted, touch-screen terminals to electronically
process stock orders in seconds—
a great improvement
compared to the archaic paper methods still used today.
The company has even taken their technology to the
next level by having runners use handheld PCs to track
stocks, place orders and complete transactions—
all from
the NYSE floor.
NYFIX is one of the financial community's fastest-growing intranets. With more than 500 high-speed intranet
circuits and 1,000 alternative routes, NYFIX processes approximately 400-750 million shares of equity order flow on
a daily basis.
In June 2001, Sean Lentner, VP of Internet Technology of NYFIX, needed a remote KVM solution to access the
company's hundreds of mission-critical servers and network devices. "When we migrated to Wintel servers, we
realized that the administrator could neither access the hardware to reboot at the BIOS-level nor disable serial ports,
RAID containers, and certain CPU functions," said Lentner. "These functions would require an administrator to
drive 100 miles to our remote data centers, wasting valuable time and resources working with Terminal Services to
reconfigure each server box."
"Initially, we used a Dell-branded Apex [Avocent] switch
and we were very unhappy with the fact that we needed
to use bulky cable from start to finish. This made the
deployment of thirty 1U servers a nightmare, due to the
space constraints in our data centers," said Lentner.
Lentner's frustration with the Apex KVM solution came
to an end when Rackit® Technology Corporation
(www.rackittechnology.com), a Raritan authorized
reseller, introduced him to Raritan's award-winning
Paragon® with Cat5 SimplicityTM and the IP-ReachTM
TR-Series remote access option. "We gave up on this
[Avocent] solution and opted for the Raritan product
because we could simply use RJ45 cables and the
Computer Interface Modules to connect all the servers
to the Paragon," he said. "With our previous solution,
we needed to know each machine's IP address in order to
connect to the remote console GUI. This became a
headache, not a solution. With Raritan, we consolidated
all the servers into one IP-Reach and Paragon switch,
which made it easy to manage the entire server farm
using a multi-tiered configuration." Lentner worked
through Rackit Technology to deploy the Raritan KVM
solution. Rackit Technology offers IT professionals an
array of expert solutions to manage LAN and datacommunication
hardware, making network environment
effectively manageable, easily accessible, safe and well
maintained, and adaptable to changing requirements."
According to Lentner, the value of the IP-Reach truly
became apparent during the 9/11 tragedy. At the time,
NYFIX was in the initial stages of using the IP-Reach
with their ASP model. When 9/11 occurred, Lentner
and his team used the IP-Reach to shift data from the
New York-based servers compromised by the incident
and reconfigured the servers in their two data centers in
New Jersey to process the transactions. "Our customers
were amazed with the lightning fast response time
required to deploy the new servers that day using the IPReach,"
said Lentner. Several days after 9/11, NYFIX
appeared in front of Congress to explain how their data
centers were less susceptible to potential terrorist attacks
versus other financial technology companies whose data
centers are located in major metropolitan areas—
the
security and flexibility of IP-Reach was prevalent in this
presentation.
Paragon provided superior performance, Cat5 Simplicity,
and 100% server availability for BIOS-level
troubleshooting and even re-booting. And with IP-Reach's
128-bit SSL-encrypted remote access, the final solution
offered secure, non-blocked multi-user access without
compromising security. According to Lentner, on one
occasion there was a problem with Terminal Services on a
server in one of the New Jersey data centers. From his
office in Stamford, he was able to use IP-Reach at the
BIOS-level to rebuild the server remotely and move a
group of customers seamlessly to another server in the
same data center.
NYFIX has been very satisfied with the Paragon/IP-Reach
solution. "The IP-Reach completes what pcANYWHERE
and Terminal Services cannot—
provide access to servers at
the BIOS-level even when the network goes down," said
Lentner. "IP-Reach acts as a standby resource in some
instances and as an active one in others."
NYFIX has realized significant savings in staff that would
have been needed in the remote data centers. Plus,
Lentner's IT security staff based in Pennsylvania can access
the servers in the New Jersey data centers as well.
The catastrophe of 9/11 has had an adverse impact on
financial technology companies whose customer data may
be at risk. Using Paragon and IP-Reach as the centerpiece,
NYFIX developed a Disaster Recovery product specifically
designed for these "worst case" scenarios.
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NYFIX
Financial technology company needed
BIOS-level remote access to hundreds of
servers and other devices
Raritan's Paragon / IP-Reach TR Series
remote KVM solution
NYFIX avoided the costs of hiring extra IT
personnel at remote data centers, made existing
operations more efficient and added the
capability of emergency access to its servers
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