ODL Securities Deploys Foundry Switches To Provide World-Class Foreign Exchange Trading Service
• Network upgrade will provide multicast support and guaranteed network uptime
• Switches installed in London headquarters
London (September 12, 2007) – Foundry Networks®, Inc. (NASDAQ: FDRY), a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announces that ODL Securities Limited, the London-based equities, derivatives and FX trading house, has installed Foundry switches to upgrade its network in a deal worth £300k. As the company has expanded globally, it needed to upgrade to an enterprise-class networking infrastructure with multicast support for its trading applications. To address its networking needs, ODL selected BigIron RX-16 Ethernet switches, NetIron XMR Internet core routers, FastIron GS compact PoE switches, and ServerIron application switches, allowing ODL customers to trade foreign exchange (FX) shares and derivatives twenty four hours a day.
Established in 1994, ODL Securities offers live online trading for equities, derivatives and FX via its bespoke trading platforms, ODL Trader and myBroker. These online trading services mean that network uptime and service availability are critical to ODL’s business operations - being down for just a few minutes could result in thousands of pounds worth of loss in business and customers.
The company is expanding rapidly following a capital investment in 2004 and increased turnover from £6.2m that year to £23.4m in 2006. Over the last three years the business has diversified into new areas, such as energy trading and fund management and increased in size from 30 to over 150 employees, driving the need for a network refresh.
Tom Higgins, ODL Securities’ global CTO said, “Our business is not only expanding in the UK, but we have recently opened offices in Tokyo and the US. We are also growing through acquisition, with the recent purchase of BestConnect in January 2007, a retail service provider electronic dealing platform. To cope with this expansion we knew we needed to overhaul our network infrastructure and selected Foundry for two key reasons – resilience and multicast support.”
ODL chose Foundry for this project because its BigIron RXs could offer unparalleled support for multicast trading applications, which ODL uses to deliver information to a group of destinations simultaneously over each network link. High performance solutions, such as the ServerIron, which provides load-balancing capabilities, guaranteeing web response by transparently steering the customer to the least busy web server, also drove ODL to choose Foundry for this project.
Higgins says, “We can have very large volumes of clients concurrently connected to our trading platforms at any moment throughout the trading day. These applications utilise multicast as their transport protocol, and we have found that Foundry’s native support of this protocol has ensured that not only is the network now more straightforward to configure, but our traders enjoy robust delivery of mission critical data to their desktop, ensuring that we are able to operate an around-the-clock non-stop network.”
As well as the excellent multicast support I was also impressed by the level of service I received from Foundry, having a close relationship with the manufacturer was key because we are investing in enterprise class technology for the very first time. Without a large IT team or in-house networking specialists, Foundry’s technical expertise and advice was critical to the success of this project.”
In addition to the criticality of multicast support the ability to uplink to the network core through 10 Gigabit Ethernet was important to ODL because it provides users with faster and guaranteed access to the trading platforms via the Internet.
ODL will run databases and multicast trading applications on the new network, as well as web and application servers. To improve network security, it will look to activate Foundry’s sFlow technology in the future to track activity on the network at a byte level. sFlow technology enables network managers to understand all the possible traffic flows, bandwidth requirements, performance implications, security threats, and billing allocations on the network. By embedding sFlow technology into a network router and switch ASICs, Foundry delivers an "always-on" technology that operates at wire speed performance.
Higgins, concludes: “My analysis of whether this project is successful will be maintaining 100 per cent network uptime in the next 12 months. We are currently only using a fraction of capacity on the network, so are confident that it is scalable enough for our future requirements.”
Bob Schiff, Foundry Networks’ Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Business Unit commented, “We appreciate that trading companies, such as ODL Securities, deal in high-pressure environments, taking on risks for corporate and private investors, and themselves. We are delighted that ODL recognised early on that Foundry was the right trusted partner to advise on the type of technology needed to support its business operations and we look forward to a continued relationship.”
