Accommodating high data volumes

The New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) is the leading "softs" commodity exchange in the world and is utilised by both domestic and international exchanges for price discovery on agricultural products.

In addition, the NYBOT generates revenue by providing commodity pricing information to its members, as well as quote vendors.

Data availability and dissemination are at the core of the NYBOT's business. When a transaction takes place on the NYBOT trading floor, the price is immediately sent to quote vendors, who in turn, display the data worldwide. The NYBOT also has a system for grading its products, requires their storage in licensed warehouses and provides data about these activities to its members.

Additionally, the NYBOT keeps records of all trades in compliance with regulations of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Client: The New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) is a commodity exchange that trades futures and options on such products as coffee, sugar, cocoa, cotton and orange juice, as well as several financial indices and currencies, including the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index, the Standard and Poor's Commodity Index, and the US Dollar Index.

Situation: The NYBOT wanted to improve its information availability (IA) capabilities to provide uninterrupted operations.

Challenge: Continuing data availability and trading floor capabilities in the event of a significant regional disaster.

The SunGard Solution: Developed a comprehensive solution that included a dedicated, hotsite and alternate space for trading.

Impact: Completed the recovery process within 12 hours of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre (WTC).

In 1993, the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) existed as the Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange (CSCE) and the New York Cotton Exchange (NYCE), which were located in the World Trade Centre (WTC) complex. When a car bomb went off in the underground parking garage on Friday, 26 February of that year, the building lost power and heat, data centre cooling was compromised, and the exchanges were forced to evacuate. The CSCE activated its IT disaster recovery plan for migration to a coldsite at SunGard and the process was complete within 48 hours. Even though the CSCE got its computer systems back online, there was no backup site from which to trade.

This led Patrick Gambaro, then Senior Vice-President of Trading Floor Operations and Systems, to recommend changes. Gambaro's proposal included a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plan with a dedicated hotsite for the computer systems - one where production data is continually copied and stored - and alternate space for trading. In 1995, a backup trading floor was completed in Queens, NY and a BC plan was adopted.

In 1998, the CSCE merged with the NYCE and became subsidiaries of the NYBOT. With money an issue, the recovery site could not grow to support the greater capacity and systems requirements.

And although the NYBOT could switch over trading operations to the Queens site in 15 minutes, it still struggled with recovering back-office operations, closing out the day's trades, and performing other critical functions. Moreover, the plans assumed that the recovery site would be a temporary location - there were no accommodations should the entire WTC complex be destroyed.

Although much progress had been made, Gambaro knew more was still necessary. As with many companies at that time, funding for a DR project was not readily available and a great deal of staff work was required to build the business case. Additionally, Gambaro had to deal with unwillingness on the part of NYBOT members to visit the site and conduct mock-trading sessions.

Gambaro overcame this issue by developing documentation, including a Member Disaster Recovery Packet, which was given to every member. This contained directions, plans for allocating shared trading floor space, schedules, information sources and contact information.

On 11 September 2001, two hijacked planes flew into Towers One and Two of the WTC. With the entire $25 million NYBOT operations, including almost $3 million in hardware and infrastructure gone, Gambaro declared a disaster at SunGard and began contacting staff and member personnel. Just before 8pm on the very same day, the NYBOT completed its disaster recovery process in Queens and was ready to trade there.

Despite the advanced pre-planning, the NYBOT encountered several challenges.

The main phone switch at the Long Island City (LIC) Queens facility did not work properly and Verizon was called to resolve the problem. In addition, more phones were needed to accommodate the compressed trading day and a switch large enough to handle the additional phone lines was not available locally. With air travel restricted in the days following the disaster, the office of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani arranged for a 1 200-port telephone switch to be flown in by Army helicopter. And once trading actually began in Queens, the NYBOT discovered that the site space was insufficient to provide traders, waiting for their turn, with a place to prepare. Thus, the NYBOT decided to lease more space, build out additional trading rings and a transitional area for members to both prepare for trading and perform post-trade activities.

Going forward, the NYBOT's plan is to establish permanent trading floor and data centre facilities within lower Manhattan during 2003. Once that has been accomplished, the LIC facility will return to its back up trading floor and hotsite status and a new disaster recovery and business continuity plan will be developed.