Italian Stock Exchange Protected by Maxava

June 3, 2014 Alex Woodie

A critical component of the Italian Stock Exchange that runs on the IBM i server is protected from downtime by high availability software from Maxava, the software company recently revealed.

Cassa di Compensazione e Garanzie (CC&G), or the Clearing and Guarantee Fund, serves as an assurance system as a central counterparty for equity markets and derivatives managed by the Italian Stock Exchange. The organization is responsible for providing efficient, secure, and accurate processing of trading, clearing, and settlement transactions on a real-time basis.

“Every day CC&G keeps track of thousands of transactions,” Mauro Fonzo, head of systems management at CC&G, says in the case study on Maxava’s website. “Traders, banks, and other economic players buy and sell on the CC&G guaranteed markets, so every single transaction must be tracked, guaranteed, cleared and communicated to the public.”

Due to the critical and time-sensitive nature of its work, it’s not surprising that CC&G chose the IBM i server on which to run its systems. (The fact that Italians love the IBM i platform doesn’t hurt either.) The organization could not take a chance that a single event would impact its work, so it needed a high availability system to reduce the risk of unplanned downtime.

CC&G selected Maxava HA Enterprise software to provide a layer of redundancy and protection across its Power Systems Model 770 machines. According to the case study, the organization uses Maxava HA Enterprise to replicate data from the production system in Rome to a local back-up machine, as well as to a third system at the disaster recovery site in Milan.

“Maxava HA was surprisingly easy and quick to install,” Mauro Fonzo, head of systems management at CC&G, says in the case study. “In total we have six LPARs and most configurations for applications were made in a very short time.”

Fonzo says his team spends about 20 to 30 minutes per day managing the HA environment. “The automatic monitoring and autofix technology provided by maxView and PatrolMax keep the daily management to a minimum,” he says in the case study. “The monitoring facilities have given us more time to spend on our normal daily activities without constantly checking for problems within our HA environment.”

The implementation was handled by Maxava’s local partner, WSS Italia. Fonzo credits the partner’s attention to detail, follow through, and quality of support with the execution of a smooth implementation.

Every vendor strives for customer satisfaction. But in CC&G’s case, a happy customer also ensures the stability of a major financial market. “When the Italian Stock Market relies on your business, it’s good to know that you have the best IT systems, technology and services available from partners such as IBM, WSS, and Maxava,” Fonzo says.

Maxava is based in New Zealand, and says it has more than 500 customers in more than 30 countries around the world. The company sells its software via traditional licenses and subscriptions for on-premise installations, as well as through cloud providers.