ABN Amro has completed the roll-out of virtualisation
technology across its derivatives trading division.
The staggered two-year deployment has improved productivity by
replacing overnight batch processing with intraday scenario
management reporting and has boosted the resilience of trading and
risk systems, said the bank.
ABN Amro has deployed Datasynapse Gridserver software in every
part of its Macro Exotics Trading operation, enabling it to run
more than 600 process-intensive pricing and batch reporting
applications across a heterogeneous virtualised IT
infrastructure.
Richard Bunting, IT relationship manager at ABN Amro, said
completing the roll-out marked the conclusion of two years' hard
work, which began in 2004 with a proposal for the division to
refactor its code base to put in a virtual system.
"At the time, we needed to scale and grow the business but we
did not have the capacity. Our software capability at the time
meant that we could not simply buy our way out of the situation
with more hardware.
"With the technology in place, we can now price on a pre-trade
basis very quickly, and running intraday batches means you can make
better risk metrics, giving more accurate information to the
trading desk."
The bank is now looking at extending the technology into its
other trading and analytics operations. It is also taking a fresh
look at its hardware to decide whether to adopt technologies such
as blade servers and how else to make best use of its legacy
infrastructure.
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