Dubai Financial Market improves bandwidth, business continuity with Nortel

The Dubai Financial Market (DFM) is the United Arab Emirates' first official stock exchange and fifth biggest exchange market in the world in capitalization, trading over 105 billion shares in 2007.

Deployed in conjunction with Nortel's system integrator, Beta Information Technology, this upgrade satisfies DFM's needs to support the increasing demands on its operational capabilities.

A continuous, order-driven and fully automated trading system and a transparent and automated information dissemination mechanism have been implemented. DFM now benefits thanks to Nortel from a 100$ always-on, always-accessible network with complete redundancy and total security.

This is essential to ensuring reliable and uninterrupted delivery of high-quality trading and information services to brokers, information suppliers and other market players that require guaranteed business availability vital for financial stock markets.

"In just five years the number of investors in our market have strongly increased from 126,000 to 627,000 in 2007 and our old network did not have enough bandwidth capacity or business continuity safeguards to handle this level of growth," said Hassan Abdulrahman Al Serkal, Operation Director, DFM.

He added:

"Nortel's 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology ensures no single point of failure while supporting immense quantities of digital information that can be accessed immediately by all users."

"Implementing the new system had to be completed overnight to avoid any disruption to the daily market activity," said Al Serkal. "The fact Nortel had our network up and running, overnight, in less than eight hours emphasized the high-level of commitment they brought to this project as well as understanding that an organization like DFM works to very tight deadlines that just couldn't be missed."

"From an IT perspective, easy management and maintenance is as important as network performance. To identify and resolve problems and performance bottlenecks before they impact network services is vital to ensure business-critical applications run without any disruption," said Ramin Attari, vice president and managing director, Nortel Middle East. "DFM IT staff can now manage and administer the network using simple graphical user interfaces and processes, liberating limited resources that can be deployed where needed."

DFM's network is based on Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) 8600 at the core, which supports full Power over Ethernet, leveraging Nortel's actively resilient switch cluster capability; complemented by multiple stacks of Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5520s to build a resilient 10 Gigabit Ethernet backbone and to deliver high-density Gigabit connectivity to the desktops of customers and users, regardless of product vendor.

Nortel has the vision, expertise and breadth of technology to help financial services firms create competitive advantage, build solid customer connections and secure critical business information. Nortel is behind the world's largest and most important stock exchanges, supporting billions of transactions in New York, Australia, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Mumbai and Seoul. More than 80% of the top 100 banks in the United States rely on Nortel.