The busiest day ever at nasdaq.com was also the day it deployed Microsoft® Windows® 2000 in its Web server farm: nasdaq.com received almost 45 million hits that day and served more than 12 million page views without a hitch. Last year, Nasdaq’s Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0–based real-time surveillance system broke records for processing-throughput rates and reduction in cost per unit transaction rates. This year Nasdaq looks forward to a new round of expansion into additional revenue-producing Internet applications—enabled by the reliability, scalability, and security of Windows 2000.
Customer Profile
The Nasdaq Stock Market, the world’s first electronic market and largest stock market by dollar and share volume, has become the model for developing exchanges worldwide. Nearly 5,000 companies—including both small, fast-growing companies and many large corporations that have become household names—trade their securities on Nasdaq.
The Nasdaq Stock Market, the world’s first electronic stock market, is also the world’s largest stock market, in both dollars traded and number of trades. In 1997 Nasdaq launched its public Web site, nasdaq.com, based on the Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 operating system. An overwhelming success from the beginning, nasdaq.com provides millions of investors worldwide with up-to-the-minute market-summary information, pricing and transaction data on 5,000 companies, stock quotes, links to listed companies’ Web sites, financial news, and more.
Nasdaq is growing at a rapid pace and expanding into Europe and Asia. Increasingly better computing capability is required to keep up with demand and to power rapid growth. That’s why for nearly four years Nasdaq has been deploying its Internet products and services on Microsoft technology. Microsoft has kept pace with Nasdaq’s ever expanding needs by continually improving its products and technologies. When the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system became available, Nasdaq quickly deployed it on nasdaq.com to take advantage of its reliability, scalability, and performance.
Alfred Berkeley, President of Nasdaq, explains why: "The funny thing about a stock market is that information about the market is as important as the market itself. Stock markets change thousands of times per second, and knowing the current status of stocks is vital to investors. The Web is a perfect vehicle for delivering this timely information, but it requires technology that’s terribly robust, very fast, and completely reliable. It also requires tight integration between the transactions that occur on the market and the information that appears on the Web. At nasdaq.com, visitors get a new Web page, updated every minute, every time they submit a quote request. To make this happen, nasdaq.com counts on Windows 2000 to provide a robust, reliable, and scalable infrastructure with the ability to operate around the clock."
In addition to running Windows 2000 on nasdaq.com, Berkeley adds, "We’re also likely to see an ever-increasing portion of our enterprise-level transaction-processing systems deployed on Windows 2000 with positive implications for reduced operations costs and shortened time-to-market."
Expectations Exceeded
In addition to bid-and-ask stock information, nasdaq.com updates total market volume, indexes, the most active stocks, and the Nasdaq 100 Index every minute. To research a company of interest, users can follow a bi-directional link from the Nasdaq site to a listed company’s site for historical or competitive information, and from there back to the Nasdaq site for a current quote and other financial information on the company.
Nasdaq.com derives its information from a multitude of sources, including price and trading information from Bridge and ILX, analysis and forecasting from I/B/E/S International Inc., market commentary and ownership information from The Carson Group, and company-performance data through Disclosure.
Nasdaq.com was originally built on Windows NT Server 4.0 with Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 and Microsoft SQL ServerTM 6.0. Since its launch, Nasdaq has continually updated the site's technology to support its growing popularity, which has been easy to do because of the tight integration between Microsoft products and developer tools. For example, Nasdaq used the Visual C++® development system to develop an extension that enables nasdaq.com to run 100 quotes per second or faster. Nasdaq also vastly expanded the information that the site provides on listed companies to include five years' worth of historical trading data, current news, and portfolio tracking.
For the latest update—the deployment of Windows 2000—Nasdaq had high expectations. As Gregor Bailar, CIO and Executive Vice President of the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), parent of The Nasdaq Stock Market, explains, "For nasdaq.com, we needed reliability, scalability, and ease of management. Windows 2000 has not only met those expectations, but exceeded them handily."
Manageability Goals Met
Exponential growth brings a need not only for reliability and scalability, but also for increased ease of management. Windows 2000 is an important part of Nasdaq’s strategy to keep its technical support costs down.
"With more than 40 Web servers, we’ve been striving for the ability to manage the entire environment as one entity. With Windows 2000 we have built-in tools that allow us to monitor each server 100 percent of the time, giving us a view of the entire environment," says Bailar. "Our operations people really like the Microsoft Management Console administration tool built into Windows 2000 because they can spot problems as they begin to develop and avert them."
Nasdaq plans to take advantage of the improved manageability features in Windows 2000 across the enterprise. For example, Nasdaq will deploy Windows 2000 Professional on its business desktops starting this year. In spite of the hardware and software upgrade costs associated with migrating hundreds of desktop computers to Windows 2000, Nasdaq expects a rapid return on its investment because of the improved manageability and reduced deployment and support costs associated with fielding new business applications. Nasdaq also expects improved worker productivity resulting from improvements in the area of security, networking, and support for modern computing devices.
Impressively Easy Deployment
Nasdaq participated in the Windows 2000 Beta program and was impressed enough with the operating system to perform the first complete deployment on its highest-volume Web site, nasdaq.com. Before the deployment, Nasdaq technical staff braced for a much more difficult process than they actually experienced. They built several brand-new servers and deployed them in the existing 40-server Web farm with ease. "Usually you get a lot of manuals to read and expect to go to training class in order to learn how to use a new operating system. We did none of that. We just got the installation disc, installed Windows 2000, and went live. It was that easy!" says Bailar.
Nasdaq.com is broken into sub-domains of 17 servers, and the main site comprises 40 servers. To mitigate risk, Nasdaq installed Windows 2000 on 17 new servers and continued running the existing Windows NT 4.0-based servers. Installing and configuring the servers was easy because Nasdaq performed unattended installs to replicate a cloned configuration across the new servers. "We were very impressed that it was so easy to deploy," says Bailar.
Impeccable Reliability
"More than anything else nasdaq.com needs to be always 'up'—that is, reliably there for investors. We offer a tremendous amount of information, and there are many peaks and valleys in site usage. Big days in the market bring a lot of visitors to nasdaq.com," says Berkeley. "We need a system like Windows 2000 that will be there, and be there reliably."
Nasdaq has always had a reputation for reliable systems, and expects that the reliability and scalability of Windows 2000 will enable the company to capture a wider range of business opportunities, such as revenue generation on the Internet, that leverages the Nasdaq reputation for reliability.
So far Windows 2000 reliability has been impeccable. "Since we deployed Windows 2000 in the heart of our Web server farm for nasdaq.com, our biggest Web site, we’ve had no reboots," says Berkeley. "That’s reliability."
Nasdaq is also excited about the scalability of Windows 2000 and its built-in Web server, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0, which is currently running the company’s toughest application. This technology has allowed Nasdaq to scale the application without worrying about reliability. As a result, Nasdaq can run fewer servers, effecting a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). "We see the reliability as rock solid, in fact significantly better than we had expected," concludes Bailar.
Fast Information Updates
Nasdaq.com applications process many terabytes of information, and this information must be refreshed on the Web site every second. Nasdaq.com simultaneously serves the information needs of thousands of individual investors with information updated continuously throughout the trading day. "For most investors," explains Bailar, "the quote data changes each time they submit a query." Over a recent six-week period, the nasdaq.com quotes page averaged a download time of just 1.67 seconds, as measured by Keynote.
"Phenomenal Support" from Microsoft
Long-term partnerships are important at Nasdaq, where business systems are constantly adjusted to meet new opportunities and needs. Nasdaq depends on business partners to help it respond effectively to ongoing changes in the expectations of investors and the technology that’s available to meet those expectations.
Berkeley explains, "We use a lot of different vendors’ products. One of the things that sets Microsoft apart is its ability to integrate and collaborate with us on new solutions. The implementation of Windows 2000 is just another step in this process, and we’ve had phenomenal support with it. Microsoft has supported a lot of these steps in the past, and we expect that it will support a lot more steps in the future."
Bringing Wall Street to Main Street
Windows 2000 is an important piece of Nasdaq’s plans for the future. Last year the company deployed its real-time surveillance system on Windows NT and broke records for processing throughput rates and for reduction in cost per unit transaction rates. This year, it expects Windows 2000 to bring improvements in the areas of reliability, scalability, and security to enable a new round of expansion into revenue-producing Internet applications.
Nasdaq is expanding into Europe and Japan in order to give investors in these areas convenient and low-cost access to high-quality U.S. growth stocks. It also hopes to continue to "bring Wall Street to Main Street" by giving people access to the market not only for transactions, but for information on their investments.
Berkeley sums it up: "Windows 2000 is an integral part of our plans for the future. It’s the way we’re going to make our system reliable and scalable. It’s going to make our system manageable, and it’s going to make our budgets work. We’re depending on it."
Software and Services
BackOffice® Server
Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition
SQL Server 7.0
Visual C++®
Visual Studio® 6.0
Windows 2000 Advanced Server with Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 and Microsoft Transaction Service 2.0
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Resource Centre at (800) 563-9048. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary.
