Luxembourg's Bank Labouchere has ordered six additional ES7000 Unisys servers to run Alex, its e-brokerage Web site. The repeat order follows the sale of two ES7000s to the bank in 2000.
Unisys says the servers' large input-output resources, critical to supporting large volumes of simultaneous user transactions, will play a key role in enabling the bank to expand availability of Alex to international customers. The Alex system enables trades on the Euronext, all the European bourses and the major US stock exchanges.
Bart van der Vlis, executive director ICT at Bank Labouchere says the new server cluster will enable the bank to overcome two serious challenges: "Exploding demand for securities trading over the Alex e-brokerage site, and a proliferation of servers handling countless individual functions."
He expects the implementation of the ES7000s to provide ample headroom for growth and give systems administrators a simplified way of managing a large array of solutions from a single control point.
The revamping of the bank's technology infrastructure began last year, when the company consolidated the workload of a server farm running over 30 Windows NT-based applications onto a single 32-processor ES7000.