For Bulls and Bears

National Stock Exchange of India connects various traders across India by
utilizing satellite technology and terrestrial leased line network to enable
transparency in trading.

The Deployment

With the use of X.25 protocol, NSE faced issues like bandwidth constraints,
lack of expansion and scalability options. So, NSE decided to set up a
nationwide network by deploying IP network. This helped NSE to further enhance
the trading experience and provide value added services. Muralidaran N, CEO, NSE
Infotech Services says that the complete project was first of its kind to be
implemented in India. Muralidaran explains that X.25 has also become obsolete
with no further development and support from equipment manufacturers.

Muralidaran opines, "Considering the fact that the trading network is the
backbone of exchange operations, 100% availability and zero downtime were the
clear objectives while opting for this project. The IP network offers a
resilient, open standard, high bandwidth and cost effective solution over the
existing X.25 network infrastructure. The changes at NSE were done seamlessly
without any downtime to the existing business."

The Building Blocks

Muralidaran says that meticulous planning helped a great deal in the successful
implementation of the project. The significance of the project was the careful
migration of each brokers branch setup spread across the country to the new
technology. A dual hub and spoke topology had been implemented with multiple
service providers and at nine points of presence (POP) across India namely:
Chennai (one POP), Mumbai (three POPs), Ahmedabad (one POP), Delhi (two POPs)
and Kolkata (two POPs). All the POPs across the country are connected to NSE
data center located in Mumbai and the BCP site located in Chennai. Members have
the option to subscribe to the nearest POP in their respective location.

The nationwide IP network project was the first of its kind to be implemented in India	Muralidaran N, CEO, NSE Infotech Services

The security challenges were  addressed through the use of a multitier
security framework that was initiated at the members end. Owing to the complex
nature and large size of implementation, Muralidaran reasons that NSE decided to
opt for Cisco as a concept partner and HCL as a rollout partner. The project
involved a high degree of synchronization across multiple teamsboth internal
and externalas it was a complete end-to-end change, starting from the member
end software, network connections and the equipment followed by the highly
resilient backbone connections to the primary and disaster recovery sites of NSE.

An application component Trading Access Point (TAP) acts as an entry point of
exchange and has several features for  the benefit of members like automatic
session recovery, rate control and others like FIX (Financial Information
Exchange) interface that are in the pipeline. Currently, the application is
functional on Linux based Fault Tolerant hardware enabling connection of
aggregation points for thousands of trading connections. There is also a custom
built messaging library that ensures guaranteed delivery of messages across
system layers. The low level design is traceable to the high level design, which
in turn is traceable to the requirements document. Additionally, this
traceability was validated during the testing of the implementation.

Shilpa Shanbhag

shilpas@cybermedia.co.in