The Luxembourg Stock Exchange is a major listing centre of international bonds, equities and investment funds. It has developed a modern trading platform for its members. Created in 1927, it has developed a specific know-how in the listing of and trading in securities from a wide range of regions. Today the Exchange has two markets, Regulated and Euro MTF, with 28,000 international bond issues representing 60% of the international bond segment. It lists 6500 investment funds in around twenty currencies, as well as 200 Global Depositary Receipts from issuers based in emerging economies. The Luxembourg Stock Exchange (Bourse du Luxembourg, BdL) is the major European listing centre for corporate bonds. On April 2, 2006, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange announced a partnership agreement with Euronext.

Business Problem:

The Luxembourg Stock Exchange had multiple critical applications, including funds management running on legacy Solaris/SPARC systems. However, the IT team was running into application compatibility issues with the latest SPARC servers running Solaris 10. In addition, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange had chosen to consolidate on Linux-based platforms.

Solution:

The Luxembourg Stock Exchange IT department migrated the applications to Linux-based platform using QuickTransit for Solaris™/SPARC® to Linux®/x86-64. In addition these were deployed in VMware virtual machines for platform consolidation and improved application management

Results:

This deployment highlights the many advantages of running QuickTransit in a virtualized environment - easy mobility of workloads, improved disaster recovery, and flexible system configuration. In addition, the Luxembourg Stock Exchanged gained these advantages:

• Solaris compatibility issues were resolved by QuickTransit
• No expensive, time-consuming or disruptive porting projects
• Legacy Solaris/SPARC applications now perform 4x faster
• Minimal impact on productivity of IT team and end users
• Additional business benefits:
  • Power costs cut by $2,400/yr
  • Power consumption cut by 24,000 kW/h per year
  • CO2 emissions cut by 10 tonnes per year