Integral Development Corporation experiences outage for approximately two hours
Between the hours of 8.43am and 10.50am Eastern Standard Time yesterday, Integral Development Corporation’s service experienced an outage which was,according to sources, had its cause rectified at 5.00pm during planned maintenance
So high is the quality of the infrastructure provided by today’s FX industry technology vendors that any outages are a great rarity, which has to be considered a great technological triumph, especially bearing in mind the multiple tasks that integration technology systems provide.
From order and liquidity flow to risk management, the specialist systems are a mainstay of this sophisticated industry.
Occasionally, however, difficulties can occur, even if they manifest themselves in a small glitch.
Yesterday, for approximately one hour, FX industry technology provider Integral Development Corporation experienced a service outage that lasted for approximately between the times of 8,43am and 10.50am.
FinanceFeeds contacted senior executives at Integral Development Corporation in order to establish the cause of this and to gain perspective on how it was resolved, however no reply was proffered, thus FinanceFeeds conducted investigations via trading logs and back office systems reports of several industry partners.
Whilst the reports from the back offices at various sources confirmed the outage, it is important to research the cause, which according to various industry information gathered by FinanceFeeds deduced that the cause of the outage was rectified in planned maintenance later in the day, itself taking 15 minutes longer than usual.
According to several industry sources, the outage occurred during the morning, however, at approximately 5.00pm Eastern Standard Time, during the period which is a period colloquially known as ‘roll’, which is when a number of server restarts happen and many traders in jurisdictions outside North America are inactive, Integral Development Corporation conducted maintenance which included a resolution to the cause of the outage earlier in the day.
This calls into question whether a back up system should be in place which diverts to an emergency server farm in the case of such an outage. Such systems have been commonplace in financial technology infrastructure for many years, including during my early years from 1991 onwards when infrastructure providers were continually testing uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) and uploading entire data sets onto DAT tapes constantly, to be able to switch to other servers in the event of an outage.
In this case, many customers did not complain about the outage, and indeed service was restored promptly.
