The largest stock exchange in Latin America is migrating away from a mainframe environment onto a platform jointly developed by Microsoft, HP and Intel.
The move by Bovespa (Bolsa de Valores do Estado de Sao Paulo, or the State of Sao Paolo Stock Exchange) is being made to reduce maintenance costs and to give the exchange more flexibility to expand its trading system as the capital market in Brazil continues to grow. The Brazilian Clearing and Depository Corporation (CBLC) is also moving to the new platform.
“In the last few years, we grew virtually 50 percent a year, and as the Brazilian interest rate gets reduced, we expect the amount of investments and business made by Bovespa’s customers to be higher and higher,” said Luiz Gonzaga de Oliveira Simoes, CIO of Bovespa.
The migration has been in the works for a couple of years, but this year, Bovespa plans to turn off the mainframe, making the migration effectively complete. Benefits to the new platform are already being felt by the exchange.
“As we migrate an entire mainframe system to the HP-Intel-Microsoft platform, we have noticed higher performance stability and fewer problems compared to the previous scenario,” said Gonzaga.
The exchange has also seen cost reductions, and since the new platform is standards-based, Bovespa can adapt to increased transaction volume without huge investments.
In addition, the exchange felt that with the mainframe environment it had become too dependent on people who knew the platform.
“Today, this is not the case anymore because it is all documented,” Gonzaga said, adding that currently all code undergoes a formal review process.
The process of migrating applications from the mainframe to the HP, Intel, Microsoft platform involved Microsoft Windows Server 2000 and 2003 operating systems and the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database. Recently it also began migrating to Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Major business applications were designed on Visual Basic 6.0 , but Bovespa also uses .NET tehnology to build new products and services.
The project involved 35 servers for the production environment and 40 servers for the development testing environment (HP Proliant and Integrity servers). Of this total the mainframe migration project required only four HP servers – two Integrity RX8620 with six Intel Itanium 2 processors each; and two Integrity RX2620 with one Itanium 2 processor each; and one 7.7 terabyte XP512 storage.
Bovespa also contracted for HP Critical Services, to continuously evaluate all the conditions affecting system availability, and used 350 official Microsoft training sessions for the development.
www.bovespa.com.br
www.hp.com
www.intel.com