Cedel Bank Grows with NT

In the fast-paced world of securities trading, where you're turning over more than half a million dollars every second, your computing environment has to be up to the task. At Cedel Bank, a global securities clearing, settlement, and custody institution, the need for a robust and stable operating system that will grow with the bank led the IS staff to Windows NT. "In an environment where high availability, security, and flexibility are mandatory, the question was never whether we should migrate to NT, but rather when and how we could best achieve the migration," said Ian Cohen, senior manager of group information services.

For several years, Cedel Bank had been actively migrating its core IS technologies from principally mainframe-based batch systems to a client/server and realtime environment. The migration was progressing well, but the client-side operating system (Windows 3.1) and network operating system (Novell NetWare) could not support increasing demands on the bank. Windows 3.1 suffered from significant memory and security constraints, and Novell was unable to provide a manageable and viable future for servers.

In 1996, Cedel Bank completed an ambitious program to migrate its entire internal network and desktop environment to NT and BackOffice. Cedel Bank adopted the latest versions of all major Microsoft products within a very short time. Both internal staff and Microsoft have hailed the migration project as a major success.

A subsidiary of Cedel International, Cedel Bank serves as a global clearing organization to minimize risk in the settlement of cross-boarder securities trading. The bank has an annualized settlement turnover rate of more than $13 trillion, holds more than $1 trillion of customers' securities in safekeeping, and processes trades of up to $100 billion every business day. Cedel Bank has offices in Luxembourg, London, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Dubai. Cedel Bank also operates Liberty, an order routing service (InterTrade) for North America, Europe, and Asia.

NT on the Fast Track
In late 1995, Cedel Bank decided to switch fully to NT, and in January 1996, the bank implemented a short-term strategy to address the following five major business requirements:

• Access from anywhere--access to any data and application (subject to security), from any company PC, at any time, from anywhere (24*7 availability)
• Security of information and services--secure access to all data and resources (thorough virus and intruder prevention and detection)
• Rapid deployment of technology--a robust framework to enable the bank to quickly build and deploy new applications
• Productivity and efficiency--improved systems management, better customer responsiveness and support, and less manual intervention
• Cost-effective services--using the most cost-effective approach to solve problems and deal with challenges (note that cost effective does not mean least expensive)

Cedel Bank created a detailed design of its future IS environment in March 1996 and began implementing its solution in October 1996, a little more than eight months from initial planning to global implementation. Although Cedel Bank's NT environment is relatively modest (about 800 users worldwide), it is very complex. "With the bank's nine offices in Luxembourg and five offices in other countries, the design of the environment needed to be right, especially when we were considering business requirements, NT domains, SMS [Systems Management Server] servers, and Exchange sites," Cohen said.

Facing demands from its users to provide significant new features and improvements for its customers, Cedel Bank scheduled an aggressive eight-month project to migrate to NT. During those eight-months, the bank

• replaced Windows 3.1 with NT 3.51 (and later NT 4.0) on all PCs
• replaced the existing servers with the newest Compaq symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) range
• replaced Novell NetWare 3.11 and 3.12 with NT Server 4.0
• migrated its network protocol from IPX/SPX to TCP/IP and its WAN protocol from X25 to frame relay
• centralized its critical data and applications on hundreds of gigabytes of realtime mirrored disk arrays
• created a warm standby facility in a backup data center
• migrated from Microsoft Mail to Microsoft Exchange
• implemented direct TCP/IP and failover with Microsoft Systems Network Architecture (SNA) Server for mainframe services
• migrated from static to fully dynamic TCP/IP addressing using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and Windows Internet Name Service (WINS)
• implemented Microsoft SMS for electronic software distribution, auditing, and management
• implemented an intranet using Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and Internet Explorer (IE) 3.0
• migrated from Microsoft Office 4.2 to Office 95
• implemented a new security model, including access from any PC via roaming hardware profiles
• implemented a complete NT printing environment

During the project's first three months (March, April, May), Cedel Bank focused on infrastructure design. Specifically, the IS staff looked at domain design, Exchange site design, SMS site design, SNA server configuration, DHCP/WINS design, LAN/WAN traffic analysis and projections, disk array and server evaluation and selection, a minimum desktop PC specification, application inventory, and so forth. The intent was to ensure that the infrastructure the bank was designing was clear from the start.