Good planning kept NASDAQ network running during attacks

When disaster struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, NASDAQ CIO Gregor Bailar was in Greenwich Village in a car en route to one of the stock site's NYC locations. After finding out that all 127 employees had been safely evacuated from NASDAQ's 1 Liberty Plaza headquarters, which are adjacent to the Trade Center complex, his first order of business as the top tech guru was to make sure the network was up and running.

Within 20 minutes, Bailar was able to secure a temporary command post at the Marriott Marquis, complete with multiple phone and Internet connection lines. The news was good immediately: NASDAQ's network had not gone down. And the fact that it didn't was a combination of good planning, a distributed architecture, and superior back up.

"Having a plan in place to respond to crisis immediately is critical," Bailar says. "At NASDAQ, every person from a Web site coder to the chairman of the company has a card with our crisis line number on it," he says. "And that infrastructure is a culture here."

Bailar points out that NASDAQ, which is really a vast distributed network, was designed for resilience. It is also a network that has long considered security a high priority.

"We know we are a target, and should consider ourselves a target, and right now that is at a heightened state," Bailar says. "We are putting in certain provisions of perimeters around both our primary and secondary data centers. There has to be a whole discipline to how you manage these large infrastructures, and now we have to be even more vigilant about both physical access and forensic readiness. We have cameras and monitoring systems so if something does happen, you know what happened. It's a difficult task, because there are so many points of potential threats - you almost can't (enumerate them all)."

Bailar says one key factor in NASDAQ's ability to stay up and running was a close partnership with its telco provider, Worldcom. "Worldcom really was an interchange provider," says Bailar, who points out that businesses whose networks rely heavily on telco providers for communications and connectivity must make sure that when they think they have access to different networks for redundancy, they really do.

"The same conduit going to what is actually the same local office location does not provide real diversity," he says. "And there is considerable work to be done and concern about the last mile."

Network Details:

NASDAQ is a network with more than 7,000 workstations from 2,400 to 2,700 sites connected to market maker servers, which provide information to traders. The workstations connect through at least 20 different points of presence, and those 20 POPs are dually and triply connected to NASDAQ's primary and secondary data centers in Connecticut and Maryland.

Every participant on the NASDAQ has a T-1 connection. The data center mirror site, which provides backup in case of a failure at the primary site has dual T-1 lines. The POPs are connected through WorldCom with 300M bits/sec connection rate in a wholly reserved network of OC/12 connections.

When a visitor, or market participant, comes into the NASDAQ data center there are three different types of computing:

Contact Senior Editor April Jacobs

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