Bloomberg Upgrades Server Pact with Sun
Sun Microsystems has agreed to a deal with Bloomberg Financial Markets that calls for Bloomberg to run its market data engine on 10 of Sun’s Unix-based E10000 servers, to replace the former six Sun E6000 servers. Rob Hall, vice president of global financial services at Sun, says that scalability was the primary motivation behind Bloomberg’s decision to upgrade to the E10000s. "Recently, because of the growth in market data demand, Bloomberg has decided that it needs a next-generation architecture that will really give them some head room and scalability," he says.
Bloomberg, Hall says, wanted to have a "back end" that could not only meet the constantly evolving needs of its Wall Street customers, but also could handle "off trading-floor applications." Besides equipping Bloomberg with a huge amount of computing power, the E10000–which Hall describes as the "most powerful, scalable Unix server" on the market–is also expected to improve Bloomberg’s reliability and fault resilience.
Hall says that Bloomberg initially started using Sun’s servers as its market data backbone around four years ago. At that time, he says, Sun "began to work with Bloomberg on automating its ticker and modernizing the IT infrastructure that they had."
Bloomberg’s new highly scalable centralized server infrastructure–which will enable clients to gain access to the firm’s market data, analytics and news from a multitude of desktop devices–is the wave of the future, Hall adds.
The problem with mainframes, servers and PCs, he says, is that they are "complicated to maintain." With that in mind, Sun used this year’s SIA show, he says, to explain the benefits of its centralized server philosophy. "What we’re demonstrating is a set of technologies that will allow a user to centralize information and applications to the degree it makes business sense," Hall says.
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