"CME's Board of Directors recognized the need for a Remote Data Center as part of our business continuity plan and approved its development in August 2001," said CME Chairman Terry Duffy. "Events have demonstrated the importance of continuity planning, and we made completion of the RDC a top priority for 2002. Our customers can now have the assurance that in time of crisis or disaster, CME markets are designed to function without interruption, providing the financial risk management that can be crucial in times of uncertainty."
"As we built the new infrastructure of the RDC, we used the opportunity to create a state-of-the-art facility and to make it our primary site for our upgraded electronic trading system," said CME President and Chief Executive Officer Jim McNulty. "This ambitious and complex project involved teams from all parts of the organization and support from our customers. Our successful deployment is a tribute to everyone involved."
While details of CME's business continuity plan are confidential for security reasons, the RDC provides additional system capacity, a third point of redundancy for CME's trading and clearing technology and dedicated workspace for key staff in the event it is needed. The use of the RDC facility as the primary site for GLOBEX operations allows the previous site to remain available to back up electronic trading operations if needed.
"As part of our upgrade, we built an entirely new network with system performance and functionality enhancements and made significant capital investments in database and order routing servers to handle increased capacity on GLOBEX," said McNulty. "With the new hardware and software successfully installed, we expect to be able to offer customers improved system performance as we embark on increasingly demanding technology initiatives. We are now ready to move to the next level of trading on GLOBEX."
The new technology deployment builds on CME's work in recent months to enhance the GLOBEX system in the areas of matching technology, order routing and market data interfaces, as well as front-end technology.
CME's iLinkSM interface, used to connect the systems of third parties, such as independent software vendors (ISVs) and brokerage firms to GLOBEX, was upgraded earlier this year to streamline certain components of the connectivity infrastructure in order to increase speed, reliability and recoverability. These improvements have reduced average customer response times to 0.3 seconds. In addition, RDC deployment provides customers with multiple iLink paths, expanding capacity and providing customers with redundant access mechanisms.
CME's Market Data API 2.0 (MD API) is an application programming interface available since June and designed to provide real-time market data on CME products to customer applications. Version 2.0 of MD API includes data streams from the GLOBEX electronic trading platform, CME's open outcry markets and OneChicago. Its features include the flexibility to subscribe to any subset of products down to the individual contract level, a choice of two levels of market depth for electronic products, direct receipt of alert messages from the GLOBEX Control Center concerning market status and the ability to download the data in raw format for subsequent analysis.
The successful implementation of CME's Market Data API version 2.0 has resulted in significant reduction in bandwidth usage of between 60 percent and 70 percent for customers. Importantly, an increase of 100 percent in throughput as compared with Market Data API 1.5 has provided significant speed improvements, particularly during the critical times of peak market activity.
In addition, CME this week deployed version 4.95g of GLOBEX Trader™, CME's proprietary direct-access interface to the GLOBEX platform. Among the new version's enhancements is spread trading functionality in anticipation of the upcoming launch of CME's Eagle project for Eurodollars.
The new GLOBEX system hardware components and upgraded software will provide functionality to support trading in security futures on OneChicago, LLC, which has announced a start date of Oct. 25, pending final regulatory approval. In addition, CME has put in place the infrastructure for CME's Eagle Project, supporting electronic spread trading in Eurodollar futures. OneChicago, LLC, is the joint venture created to trade single stock futures and narrow-based stock indices by Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (CME), Chicago Board Options Exchange® (CBOE®), and Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT®).
Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (www.cme.com) is the largest futures exchange in the United States and the second largest exchange in the world for the trading of futures and options on futures. As an international marketplace, CME brings together buyers and sellers on its trading floors and virtually around the clock on its GLOBEX electronic trading platform. CME offers futures contracts and options on futures primarily in four product areas: interest rates, stock indexes, foreign exchange and commodities. The exchange moves about $1.5 billion per day in settlement payments and manages $27.1 billion in collateral deposits. CME is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc.
