London Stock Exchange Upgrades Its Disaster Recovery Facilities

MANAGEMENT & OPERATIONS

THE London Stock Exchange (LSE) has enhanced its disaster recover facilities in preparation for the launch of its new order-driven electronic trading system.

The LSE held rehearsals of its new system on the weekends last month (Dealing with Technology, October 3). It plans to go live with the new system, dubbed Stock Exchange Electronic Trading Services (SETS), on October 20.

SETS is expected to increase liquidity and provide trading opportunities that will allow additional institutional investor participation in London's stock markets (DWT, August 8). This added liquidity is expected to increase volumes on the LSE. The new platform can handle over 275,000 traders per day on the domestic market, over twice the highest LSEvolume level ever recorded.

Added volume

The exchange has upgraded its trading systems disaster recover facilities to handle these expected additional volumes.

To assure continued trading in the event of a systems crash, the LSE has installed three separate lines connecting the stock exchange with a backup location.

Trades are mirrored on magnetic tape minute-by-minute, says Jeremy Oates, an associate partner with Andersen Consulting, which is working on the disaster recovery project.

Four hours delay

"If there's a failure, or a jumbo jet hits the building, we can bring the system over and run it from our alternative site in four hours," says Oates.

The time delay, he adds, is mostly due to the time it takes to get the staff in place and get systems fully operational. The LSE holds four drills a year to train personnel on how to operate from the disaster recover site.

LSE officials decline to disclose the exact location of the secondary site for security reasons. It is located in London, but far enough from the City that "you'd need an atomic bomb to wipe them both out", says Oates.