LSE completes next stage in IT overhaul

Exchange on course in four-year technology programme

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has successfully completed a major part of its four-year programme to move its technology infrastructure onto a low-cost commodity platform based on Windows and Intel technology.

Infolect, an information delivery system that is critical to the successful operation of the exchange, has now been operating for five weeks.

David Lester, chief information officer of the LSE, says the system is the biggest test to date of the new technology architecture the Exchange is moving to.

'Infolect is a system that broadcasts data out to the market, such as the last trade, the current best price of a stock, breaking regulatory news and so on,' he said.

'It's the first absolutely mission critical system to move from our HP Tandem NonStop environment to our commodity hardware platform.'

A key benefit of the change is cost: doubling the system's capacity in a commodity environment costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, rather than the millions it would cost in the Tandem environment.

Infolect has approximately 100 commodity servers underpinning it, which broadcast more than 10 million messages a day to a total of 97,000 terminals in over 100 countries.

'It fits with one of the key principles of the project: get it onto commodity hardware so you can scale at a fraction of the price,' said Lester.

Another benefit of the switch is performance. Lester says the system's latency is the lowest of any such system in the world, now measurable in milliseconds rather than tens of milliseconds.

Infolect, which is based on Microsoft's .Net environment, went live after 15 months of testing. The system has been reliable so far, although Lester says it's too early to tell for sure after having been live for such a short time.

First outlined in early 2003, the LSE's technology roadmap aims to achieve about £8m in cost savings, while boosting scalability and enabling the company to add new markets quickly and easily.

The exchange has now moved 53 of its 65 systems onto the Microsoft platform.

The next key milestone will go live in the middle of 2006, while the final step - the trading platform that the actual exchange runs on - is due at the start of 2007.