MEFF, the Spanish Financial Futures Exchange, has upgraded the technology used to access its MEFF S/MART platform. It says the new configuration will significantly improve the connection for its 100 members with MEFF’s IT centres in Madrid and Barcelona leading to a more efficient service for the more than 500 traders that trade futures and options through this exchange.
The upgrade of MEFF’s IT platform, has been carried out with Sun Microsystems. This project, together with further changes to MEFF’s communications network, will enable the derivatives exchange to handle, with full guarantees, the significant increase in the number of transactions that it is experiencing. MEFF says this increase in business is due to a constant growth in the number of participants and the increasing automation of transactions. The new MEFF platform can now manage up to 800 messages per second and has the capacity to manage a significantly greater number of transactions to respond to growth in demand.
The renovation project involves the replacement of almost 200 servers with new Sun Solaris servers that will be installed progressively in a scaled manner over a 2 month period. This gradual migration onto the new system is essential given that the platform manages an average of more than 4 billion euros daily and any interruption in the service would have a very significant impact on the business.
At present, the MEFF platform manages more than one trillion euros per year, 2.3 million outgoing messages and 685,000 incoming messages daily, with an average response time of 0.10 seconds from when the order is entered in the terminal until it receives the order confirmation.
MEFF is a fully electronic exchange, designed to integrate trading, clearing and settlement in a single system, with a highly reliable network that interconnects the locations of all the members MEFF’s IT centre in Barcelona and its sister facility located in Madrid.
MEFF has scaled its access lines at 256 Kbps, point to point, redundant and managed by different operators, guaranteeing almost one hundred percent availability.
MEFF S/MART, which is being continuously developed, has been created to guarantee maximum security and reliability in trading, with real time market surveillance and risk control.