Pan-European exchange Euronext says its upgraded equities trading platform, NSC Equities, will go live in early 2007 and will offer users an average response time of under five milliseconds.
Early performance tests by Euronext's IT service provider Atos Euronext Market Solutions (AEMS) and teams from IBM have shown that the new platform will be capable of handling up to 10 times current volumes at 20 times the speed, says Euronext.
The system is able to maintain a sustained workload of 25,000 orders per second, with peaks at 50,000 orders per second lasting five minutes and 100,000 orders per second during a 10 second period. Over 100 million orders were handled and 20 million trades generated in two hours, says Euronext.
The upgraded trading platform, which is based on Linux-IBM technology, also meets demanding industry standards for resilience and availability, with a fault-tolerant architecture and real-time database replication to the disaster recovery site.
The changes are being made as part of Euronext's Technological Enhancement Programme. In August 2006 the exchange upgraded its existing networks, enabling a 50% performance improvement in data distribution.
Swiss-German derivatives exchange Eurex said earlier this week that it is upgrading its technology infrastructure to cater for an increase in proprietary and algorithmic trading techniques. Eurex's parent Deutsche Börse has also been enhancing its trading platform, offering participants four times the previous network bandwidth since the beginning of December.