National Stock Exchange of India provides online trading platform to the
trading community in India. By utilizing modern satellite technology and
terrestrial leased line network to connect traders across the country, NSE
provides for fairness and full transparency for the nation's trading activity.
The previous network infrastructure used the X.25 protocol over its Wide Area
Network. With X.25 technology, NSE faced issues like bandwidth constraints and
lack of expansion and scalability options. Also, X.25 has become obsolete with
no further development and support from equipment manufacturers.
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M Muralidaran
CEO |
QWhy did NSE wait for such a long time before migrating to an IP
Network?
The market platform provided by the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE)
caters to the trading needs of the entire nation and it is the
responsibility of the leader to continue meeting this need by ensuring the
necessary capacity, stability and reliability. The trading network, which is
the country's largest closed user group network, is terrestrial as well as
satellite based having over ten thousand links leading to a 100 thousand
plus terminal connectivity to the trading engine. A sizable investment has
gone into the creation and maintenance of this infrastructure. The X.25
infrastructure was suitably sized to provide for the needs of the market's
traffic and along with the software capabilities sufficient buffer capacity
was kept available as required. Technology keeps changing and with Internet
Protocol (IP) becoming the preferred protocol, X.25 saw decline in support,
development and research from the equipment manufacturers. Issues like
bandwidth constraints and ready technical skill set availability were other
reasons favoring NSE's choice towards IP. NSE has balanced the risk by
migrating to the IP network at the most appropriate moment.
QPlease comment on the complexity of this project.
The complete project concept is new and first of its kind in India. A dual
hub & spoke topology has been implemented with multiple service providers
and nine Points of Presence (POPs) across India. The project involved the
migration of each broker's branch setup spread across the country to the new
technology. Migrating to the IP network is a complete end-to-end change:
starting from the member end software, network connections and equipment
followed by the highly resilient backbone connections to primary and
disaster recovery sites of NSE, through the revamped data centers and
finally to the IP enabled software at the exchange end. The IP network has
its own challenges of security which are being addressed by a multi-tier
security framework starting at the perimeter at the member end. These
changes were required to be done seamlessly without any downtime to the
existing business. To address this challenge the exchange facilitated
trading members to retain the X.25 infrastructure in parallel with the IP
infrastructure for a reasonable period. The entire channel of trading was
thus running in parallel on both IP and X.25 with full reliability during
the entire migration period. The steps involved and the orchestration of the
complete setup was sophisticated enough to classify the project as complex.
QAmong other benefits, what benefits does this project bring to a
common man and India as whole ?
The key benefit the project brings to the common man of the country is to
provide cost savings, new value added services and products and stable
market access. A trading member is able to consolidate the trading
infrastructure to reduce business costs and at the same time enjoying the
benefit of new products accessible on the new network. NSE provided new
value-added services to the investor community. As an example, the new
high-frequency market data which is the key for trading decisions will allow
the investor to make efficient calls.
Measures have also been taken to improve the availability of the platform
by the dual hub and spoke model providing seamless connectivity to the
disaster site apart from the primary site. This provides a predictable
market access to the common man by offsetting the technology risk.
The platform is in line with that of international exchanges and NSE
shall be able to provide more innovative and value added services to the end
user thereby bringing higher financial inclusion and stable access. |
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So, NSE decided to migrate its entire network onto IP. Under this project,
nine POPs (Points of Presence) were created across 5 cities in India. The number
of POPs in each city was based on the number of trading members in that city.
All POPs are connected to the data center as well as the Disaster Recovery Site
over high Speed links (Mainly STMs). The DR site is true replica of DC in all
aspects. The POPs are connected to both data center and disaster recovery sites
in redundant mode. POPs are mainly located at different places based on the
member density. The POP configuration will take care of members connecting to
Exchange only and will stop any intra member traffic. Members can connect to the
exchange only through POPs or through Vsat links. The member can opt for single
leased line or single Vsat connection or a leased line with Vsat backup or two
leased lines in redundant mode. Also members have a choice of selecting the POPs
based on their office location. An application component Trading Access Point
(TAP) acts as entry point to exchange and has several features for member
benefits like automatic session recovery, rate control and many more in pipeline
like FIX (Financial Information Exchange) interface. Application is running on
Linux based Fault Tolerant hardware to act as connection aggregation points for
thousands of trading connections. A custom built Messaging library guarantees
delivery of messages across system layers. Biggest challenge for NSE in this
project was to carry out the migration activities without impacting the existing
business. To meet this challenge, NSE has ensured co-existence of entire path of
X.25 and IP until the last member is migrated. Another challenge NSE faced was
in familiarizing the 1000 plus members of NSE on the new infrastructure, mapping
their existing infrastructure to the scenarios opened up with IP. Under the new
network, members can transact more with lesser infrastructure leading to reduced
costs. It allows real time market data multicast over NSE private network,
reaching every trading terminal with very low latency, thus providing the latest
picture of the order book and liquidity available in the market. Investors and
dealers can now take more efficient trading decisions with introduction of the
new Market data feed which contains latest rate refresh at High Frequency.
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Company Scenario |
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Before Deployment |
- NSE used X.25 protocol over its WAN. With X.25 technology NSE was
facing limitations such a bandwidth constraints, lack of expansion &
scalability issues.
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After Deployment |
- New network incorporates high bandwidth, high performance backbones
from each POP
to the datacenters, to deliver
extremely low latency and business continuity.
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