Winterflood Securities Deploys Cisco Unified Computing System to Improve Business Operations and Support Future Growth

LONDON, 25 February 2010 - Cisco today announced that Winterflood Securities, one of the leading liquidity providers in London, has deployed the Cisco Unified Computing System^TM to improve the resilience, agility, scalability and flexibility of its high frequency trading platform. Working with Logicalis, a Cisco® Gold Certified Partner, Winterflood Securities has undertaken a project to migrate its VMware infrastructure to the new platform. This is the first Cisco UCS to be deployed in the UK and will deliver significant first-mover performance and competitive advantage benefits to Winterflood Securities.

Key facts/Highlights:

Winterflood's data volumes have increased exponentially in a short span of time especially since the advent in Europe of the 2007 Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID). This has resulted in significant fragmentation across the European market place. Winterflood provides access to these fragmented markets, maximising liquidity availability and execution services to its clients. With the continued profusion of market data Winterflood routinely process in the order of 250 million market data updates a day with peaks often passing 30,000 updates in a second. Winterflood's growth and its connection to new markets and exchanges highlighted there was a clear need to expand upon its existing data-processing capabilities and maximise business opportunities.
However, this dramatic rise in volume is much more than a scaling issue. With many more prices to monitor across a growing number of marketplaces around the world, along with more stringent obligations to deliver the best prices for clients across these markets, the reliability, speed and flexibility of Winterflood's trading platform is more important than ever
Winterflood is in the process of migrating its VMware vSphere virtualisation infrastructure onto the Cisco Unified Computing System, initially incorporating 20 blades across four chassis in two locations
Cisco Advanced Services worked in concert with Logicalis' services to plan, design and implement the customer solution. Cisco Advanced Services delivered the Cisco Unified Computing System Startup Accelerator Service to speed Winterflood's deployment of the platform, working with Logicalis to optimise the solution to Winterfloods' needs, leveraging the best practice experience gained through internal usage of the Cisco Unified Computing System and other deployments worldwide
Because of the platform's inherent flexibility, reliability and scalability, Winterflood believes that the deployment of trading applications can be carried out in a much quicker timeframe, thereby, helping it to capitalise on new market opportunities much more quickly.
Some of the key features of the deployment are the simplicity and flexibility with which new blades can be commissioned and integrated into the infrastructure. The platform also brings additional benefits of improved resilience and scalability, decreasing risk across the organisation's IT-based operations while optimising usage across less hardware
Components of the implemented solution include four Cisco Unified Computing System chassis (five blades in each); Cisco Nexus® 1000, 2000 and 5000 Series Switches; Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switches; Cisco Advanced Services; and Cisco SMARTnet® Support.

Supporting Quotes:

"Capitalising on new market opportunities as and when they arise marks the difference between success and failure in the capital markets," said Grant Davidson, manager, IT special projects, Winterflood. "We see this as a strategic implementation that will provide us with the flexibility, agility and reliability that will allow us to adapt with the demands of the market and our clients, delivering the services they require. With Cisco Advanced Services working in concert with Logicalis' services, the integration of the Cisco platform with our existing network has been a simple and straightforward process and we look forward to a continued successful relationship."

"The Cisco Unified Computing System platform has tremendous potential to transform the data centre into a dynamic IT environment, increasing productivity, improving business agility, minimising downtime and facilitating scalability," said John Donovan, Vice President Private Sector UK & Ireland. "For Winterflood, optimisation is a key step in not only improving current business operations but also preparing IT infrastructure for future growth. We're delighted to work with Winterflood as it improves the connectivity and resilience of its business, and we're confident that the Cisco Unified Computing System will deliver the benefits and capabilities that it needs to do so."

About the Cisco Unified Computing System

The Cisco Unified Computing System unites computational, network, storage access and virtualisation resources in a single energy-efficient system that can reduce information technology infrastructure costs and complexity, help extend capital assets, and improve business agility well into the future.
Based on industry standards, the Cisco Unified Computing System is a new computing model that uses integrated management and combines a "wire once" unified fabric with an industry-standard computing platform to optimise virtualisation, reduce a data centre's total overall cost, and provide dynamic resource provisioning for increased business agility. The Cisco Unified Computing System:

Reduces the total cost of ownership: up to a 20 per cent reduction in capital expenditures (capex) and up to a 30 per cent reduction in operational expenditures (opex).
Improves IT productivity and improves business agility, provisioning applications in minutes instead of days and shifting the focus from IT maintenance to IT innovation.
Increases scalability without added complexity; it is managed as a single system, whether it has one or 320 servers with thousands of virtual machines.
Improves energy efficiency by significantly reducing power and cooling costs.
Provides interoperability and investment protection through industry-standards-based infrastructure.