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Non-Tech : E*Trade (NYSE:ET) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tcd who wrote (7206)	6/16/1999 11:45:00 AM
From: X Y Zebra	Respond to of 13953

Here is the full story: Message 10141051 Personally, I believe the world market, (as I view the market for "on line brokers"), is of such considerable size that only those firms with the proper technology and taking an aggressive attitude to go after said market, will succeed. Schwab and E-Trade seems to be on that list. Schwab may have the advantage due to its current size, and progressive mentality. However, E-Trade, given its current size, may enjoy a tremendous growth if they play their cards right. (which they seem to be doing.) Only my opinion.

To: tcd who wrote (7206)	6/16/1999 11:51:00 AM
From: WhySoSoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13953

tcd It just tells you yet another chapter of the advancement of technology to embrace this new world. Everybody is striving for fault tolerance system but in reality there is none. The best is to decrease the risk to minimum. This is yet another chapter that the R&D expenses have to be spent. E*Trade has already been doing it with SUNW and ORCL to achieve that.

To: tcd who wrote (7206)	6/16/1999 4:50:00 PM
From: Dorine Essey	Respond to of 13953

I can't believe it will have any effect on Etrade IBM mainframes to take on Schwab traffic* By Bloomberg News Special to CNET News.com June 16, 1999, 12:20 p.m. PT Charles Schwab Corp., aiming to prevent Web site crashes and handle growth in customer stock trades, will use new IBM technology to balance the loads borne by computers at Schwab data centers 25 miles apart. IBM and Schwab will deploy the new technology to handle volume swings and limit site outages. San Francisco-based Schwab has 16 mainframes--closet-sized, $2 million machines that are the brains of its trading system--divided between two data centers in separate areas of Phoenix. Schwab's Web site crashed seven times in the first four months of this year as its trading volume, sparked by the rising popularity of the buying and selling of stocks over the Internet, rose by two-thirds to an average of 207,700 daily. About 70 percent of Schwab's total trades now come over the Internet, up from 61 percent at the end of 1998. "It's all around the customer experience because we really don't have the luxury anymore of planned or unplanned outages,'' said Fred Matteson, Schwab's chief technologist. "We are one click away from a competitor.'' The increase in online trading has made it critical for Schwab's computers to operate as continuously as possible. "This isn't your everyday growth, and expectations have grown as well,'' said Matteson. "In the past if you needed to add capacity you shut it down and powered it back up.'' The new IBM software and computer networking equipment, known as Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex technology (GDPS), will allow "pieces'' of Web trading systems to go down without customers noticing, he said. "Frankly, some of our outages have been [caused by] stretching the limits.'' With GDPS, Schwab can split the trading volume among its mainframes more evenly than before, easing the workload on all the machines, IBM said. Schwab can even switch all trading to one data center if the mainframes in the other center crash, IBM said. San Francisco-based Schwab now has 6.1 million accounts containing $564 billion in assets. Customers who trade online have assets of $234 billion in 2.7 million accounts. Merrill Lynch's plan to offer online trading to all its 5 million account holders will prove difficult because its reliance on brokers "puts a person in between the customer and the technology,'' Matteson said. Allowing direct access without a middleman is a "profound'' change. Schwab can now handle 40,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users and 500,000 separate users in a day. It will add two new IBM mainframes later this year as part of its plans increase capacity by two to three times the volume it can now accept. Schwab accounted for about 28 percent of all online trades at the end of the first quarter, according to U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. The Phoenix data centers are on separate power grids and in separate flood plains, reducing the likelihood of one disaster affecting both, Matteson said. Schwab also has a backup data center run by Comdisco Inc. at an undisclosed location elsewhere. Schwab and Armonk, New York-based IBM have worked together for years, though some of Schwab's mainframes were made by Hitachi Ltd. Schwab's chief information officer, Dawn Lepore, said last week that she has "been known to call'' IBM Chairman Louis V. Gerstner Jr. when major system problems occur. "We're pushing our vendors more,'' she said. Copyright 1999, Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.