18 December 2003 Hong Kong Lightwave -- CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, one of Asia's top brokerage, investment banking, and private equity houses, has implemented a new network infrastructure based on Cisco Systems' ONS 15530 DWDM switch.
Prior to deploying the new Cisco optical technology at CLSA's Hong Kong headquarters, any network interruptions in the 24,000-square-foot (2,232-square-meters) dealer-room would potentially cost millions of dollars in revenue. The new network integrates data networking and storage replication over an intelligent metro optical network. The upgrade brings greater access, stability, and speed to CLSA's extensive financial research database, brokerage transactions, settlement systems, and other internal functions. The network also supports dealer-room operations across 12 other cities in the region, with Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, and Mumbai ranking highest in turnover.
CLSA's previous network infrastructure between its primary data center in Admiralty and the secondary facility in Kowloon was not only expensive to maintain but also prevented implementation of remote clustering and had less diversity and resiliency. These problems could result in costly disruptions to the financial transactions made by CLSA's brokers and customers. When considering how best to upgrade their network, CLSA representatives determined that improved system availability and WAN resiliency with a lower operating expense were their primary considerations.
Cisco's DWDM technology offered CLSA a way to increase network throughput, data replication, and resiliency. With 50% of its transactions handled electronically representing tens of millions of dollars, CLSA required greater availability and reduced occurrences of network outages. Cisco claims its networking solution increased network resiliency, allowing CLSA to maintain an acceptable fault tolerance for its mission-critical transaction systems while still maintaining low costs.
The new network, implemented jointly with Hutchison Global Communications and Cisco channel partner Macroview, also involved the upgrading of CLSA's DS-3 lines to high-speed Fast Ethernet connections and an upgrade of the broker's storage area network.
"Cisco and Hutchinson offered the best solution in terms of resiliency and cost savings," asserts Andrew Yu, head of infrastructure at CLSA. "Data replication bandwidth increased six-fold with higher resiliency and at a cost of half as much as maintaining the existing system. We now have an infrastructure capable of supporting straight-through processing of time-critical electronic transactions with sufficient load balancing to allow outlying offices to access both data centers."
The Cisco ONS 15530 is a scalable metro DWDM multiservice aggregation platform that integrates data networking, storage, and legacy applications over a metro optical network. The switch features eight ports that support Fibre Channel, Fiber Connection (FICON), or Gigabit Ethernet, or 40 ports of Enterprise Systems Connection (ESCON) per 10-Gbit/sec wavelength, and multiservice support of SONET/SDH and other protocols.