E*Trade trading system architecture based on Sun Servers. Lots of
good things to say about Sun (and NetScape App Servers for that
matter) by the E*Trade CIO Debra Chrapaty. See here for the complete
transscript of her presentation to a local Java users group. Very compelling read in my opinion:
ftp://ftp.dnai.com/users/c/cityjava/etrade.doc
And E*Trade Group (EGRP) looks like good investment too.
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Our technology center is made up of many components, not the least of which is servers, so I'll talk to Susan first. I'll praise our server environment. Our environment is Sun Solaris. And so - and we'll go into a little bit of detail about our architecture. But what we did is we reinvented our applications layer architecture, moved away from CGI and C++, which we had as building sort of, you know, a process layer to connect to our back-end transaction processor. We moved to a product called Netscape Application Server to a - which was originally called Kiva - and so we have Kiva servers. We have a transaction process layer which is BA Tuxedo. And we have Oracle databases on the back, and we'll go through this in more detail.
So the server environment are web servers right now, Kiva servers - I'll call them Kiva servers, although Netscape gets mad at me because then they don't get their branded image. So
every time I say Kiva, you think Netscape, OK?, because Kiva to me is a much sexier term, and I just like - it feels better on the tongue. Kiva. That's great. Do that. So we have a couple of work groups. We have four work groups in each technology center. Web server, Kiva server, Tux server, database server. Our network equipment - and they're all Sun - let me say this real quick - they're all Sun servers, the Enterprise 4000 servers. We have the 6 CPU servers and a couple of 4 CPU servers for some of the Kiva boxes. We love them. They're terrific. We just upgraded from the Ultra 2 environment. And I think the Ultra 2 made sense for E-trading. We were a little smaller, and we couldn't anticipate growth and volume, so we could just pop another one in. But, you know, when you've got like 40 and 50 of these things, it gets a little intense. So we moved to the E 4000.
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[inaudible question]
" Could you say again what the NT machines do and, as opposed to what the Sun machines do.
DC: Sure. The NT environment is strictly for our internal local area network. And so E-trade, like any other company, we have E-trade, the business, and we have E-trade, the company. And from my perspective, you know, and I didn't mention this, but technology's a very large part of E-trade. And so we have about 200 people working in our technology function. Sure, some of them are working on the production environment, but some of them run the business, whether
that's, you know, our internal local area network and wide area network, folks working on business systems, finance, [inaudible], sales and marketing systems, relational databases that we use to do customer segmentation. So, you know, we've got a whole company internally that runs on NT.
Yeah?
" How many customer log-on's are you seeing in the peak hours, and how many web servers do you have to support them?
DC: How many customer log-on's am I seeing during peak hours, is the question, how many servers do I have to accommodate them? Without getting into too much detail, we generally see at peak hours somewhere around 10,000 concurrent people trying to hit our server at any moment in time. So that's general - and our trading volumes are - you know, if I see them in the morning, I can track them, and I can pretty much tell you where we're going to end the day. You know, they're always tradition. Market opens, peak goes up; you know, midday it comes down, end of market. And anyone from Schwab out there? You see the same patterns, right? Up, down. Yeah, I mean it's very standard. So how many servers do we have to accommodate them? We can go into that in a little more detail. But, as I mentioned, we have four work groups in both locations that are mirrored. Two - actually not two web servers. We've got ten web servers, two Kiva servers, two Tux servers, one database server right now. And what's interesting about our environment: we're in the midst of a big change. And I don't know how many of you know, but we're moving into a new product. That product is our new destination site, Destination E-trade.
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