Cisco Live, LAS VEGAS, NV – July 15, 2011– Across the global financial markets industry, new trading strategies, fragmented liquidity venues, and requirements for best execution are driving the need for optimal reliability, predictability and ultra-low-latency connected data centers.  Delays to transactions--even fractions of seconds-- can cost millions of dollars, prompting the most successful investment firms to seek out stock exchanges that have the highest performing networks.    To meet these needs, The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc., the world's No. 1 provider of technology to exchanges, clearinghouses and regulators, has selected the Cisco Data Center Business Advantage portfolio to evolve NASDAQ OMX PHLX, the Philadelphia-based, high-performance options trading exchange.

NASDAQ OMX PHLX has selected Cisco's Data Center Business Advantage portfolio, the foundation of Cisco's financial markets-specific high performance trading fabric, as the infrastructure for its options trading exchange and its evolving data center architecture.  NASDAQ OMX PHLX has deployed the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches and the Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extender (FEX),which provides scalability and a simplified, single point of management capability.

Additionally, users have seen significant performance improvement, including reduced latency and jitter, and a greater ability to scale capacity while maintaining high-performance.  This new Cisco deployment adds to previously deployed financial markets solutions for switching, routing, security and collaboration within other NASDAQ OMX environments. 

Cisco serves as a NASDAQ OMX strategic technology provider to ensure continual leading-edge services to the organization's customers, and  has collaborated closely with NASDAQ OMX to help ensure its data centers offers growth, scalability, virtualization, and the highest reliability and performance. 

KEY FACTS / HIGHLIGHTS

• NASDAQ OMX powers one of every 10 transactions around the world.  NASDAQ OMX's global platform is the fastest on the planet and can handle more than 1million messages per second at sub-100 microsecond average speeds.
• NASDAQ OMX's options exchange trades more than 2,600 equity options, sector index options and U.S dollar-settled options on major currencies, and in combination with NASDAQ Options Market represents approximately 27 percent of total US equity options trading.
• For the Options Trading Exchange, the NASDAQ OMX IT team deployed  Nexus 5000 Series Switches and Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders, which are future-proofed to deploy a unified fabricwith fibre-channel-over-Ethernet.  With Cisco Fabric Extender architecture, NASDAQ OMX can continue to add data center capacity at a rapid rate without having to add IT staff, and existing staff can focus more on supporting key business objectives.
• The Cisco Borderless Networks solutions in NASDAQ OMX's existing core trading system include more than 1,300 routers and switches and 200 Cisco firewall devices for security.
• Dimension Data served as NASDAQ OMX's solution provider for the Philadelphia-based Options Trading Exchange deployment.

SUPPORTING QUOTES

"NASDAQ OMX's close collaboration with Cisco is a journey, not an event," said Lou Modano, head of global infrastructure for NASDAQ OMX.   "Cisco's networking and data center architectural expertise, and the depth and breadth of its solution set, provide NASDAQ OMX with a leading-edge foundation for future growth.   With Cisco at our side, we never have to go back and re-architect, but can continually use our IT investments to build on our foundation and provide the highest performing services and functionality to our customers. This helps us to provide the best possible trading experience for our customers."

"NASDAQ OMX's data center and networking infrastructure is one of the world's most complex and high- performance trading environments, handling a huge number of financial transactions daily," said John McCool, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco's Core Technology Group.   "The deployment of Cisco's innovative networking portfolio at NASDAQ OMX sets the standard for leading-edge data center and scalable networking architectures for customers worldwide, and Cisco is honored to enable NASDAQ OMX's business transformation."

SUPPORTING RESOURCES

• Read more about the Cisco Data Center Business Advantage
• View video on Cisco IT Cloud Architecture 
• View Cisco Nexus® Series switches website
• Read Cisco Unified Computing website
• Read Cisco Unified Fabric website
• Read Cisco Data Center Networks blog
• View Cisco Financial Markets website
• View printable High-Performance Trading Fabric Poster
• Read more on Cisco Algo Speed HFT Solution
• Read Cisco Financial Services blog

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