With UniKix rehosting solutions from Clerity, NYSE Euronext has realized dramatically lower cost-per-transaction rates, improved performance, and modernized its core environment to a flexible, open systems platform better equipped to handle changing market requirements and accommodate future growth.

In 2006, when the Shared Data Center team, the technology arm of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), evaluated its internal infrastructure in light of competitive market factors, changing regulations, and anticipated future growth, the decision was made to replatform its 1,660 MIPS mainframe workload onto IBM System p Model 595 servers running AIX and UniKix rehosting software from Clerity.

"Quite simply, we can now transact more business per hour at a lower rate," said Francis Feldman, Vice President of the Shared Data Center. "Open systems servers and middleware technology have greatly evolved over the past decade. The combination of UniKix on System p servers gave us the reliability and flexibility we required at a competitive price point to quickly enhance our market position."

The Shared Data Center (SDC) team clears and settles all daily trades for the NYSE. The SDC team investigated several options, including outsourcing and rewriting its custom applications, before selecting to rehost its mainframe workload. When time-to-completion, switching costs, end user impact, and staff training requirements were taken into consideration, rehosting its environment using UniKix technology and migration services from Clerity quickly became the leading choice.

"Even with the compelling return on investment and availability levels we could obtain on open systems, we would not have moved our mainframe environment without a successful proof of concept and clear accountability from our migration vendor," added Francis Feldman. "Clerity successfully demonstrated that they could address the high online and batch transaction levels we required. They did not just look at our applications in isolation, but also worked with our team to address our complete environment, providing expertise both on the server and storage infrastructure side as well as with the selection and integration of third party utilities such as sort programs, development tools, and resource management facilities."

The SDC team leveraged parts of Clerity's Mainframe Rehosting Reference Architecture to select and deploy several infrastructure tools and utilities on its IBM POWER-based AIX servers. Linux-based HP ProLiant servers running PolyServe software were also installed to provide network attached application and file serving. The target IBM and HP environments were set up across two data centers and mirrored to deliver backup and recovery levels comparable to the previous mainframe sysplex complex.

On April 28, 2008, the SDC team retired its mainframe system. Since that date, the SDC has processed all of its transactions on UniKix technology. A key nightly batch window that used to take nearly 12 hours to process now completes 5 hours ahead of schedule and online performance rates on the IBM System p servers are exceeding the previous mainframe platform.

The successful replatforming of this mission-critical mainframe workload to open systems will play a key role in the continued evolution of the SDC over the years to come.