NZdata Service for the New Zealand Financial Markets Association

The NZdata Service is a market data collection and disemination system.

The system allows the major banks, primarily from New Zealand and Australia to contribute market data for one or more finiancial markets within a defined period of time.  The data is monitored in realtime by a support person who checks for any incorrect rates or outlying rates.

Once the contribution window closes the market is calculated and the rates are distributed to various vendors such as Thompson Reuters and Bloomberg who then distribute the data around the world to subscribers.

The system is written in VB.NET and ASP.NET 3.5 utilising ASP.NET Membership Services, AJAX.NET, Web Services and Microsoft SQL Server.

The system consists of a Windows Service that maintains a TCP connection to the vendors comminicating using XML, Web Services for distributing data to other subscribers such as the NZFMA website, and a website that the banks and brokers contribute their rates to.  The system also distributes market data to subscribers by emailing a spreadsheet of the rates.

Due to the time critical nature of the system it required a fully redundant system.  To cater for this we built an environment using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterpise Edition using DFS (Distributed File System) for realtime data syncronisation between servers, Windows Clustering and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database mirroring.  This environment allows the system to automatically switch over to a redundant server in the event of a hardware or software failure either partially or completely depending on the failure.

The system is also monitered off site by SysMon, a system monitoring system also developed by expert.  In the event of a service or server failure a technician is notified via a SMS text message.  In the event the system or service recovers, another SMS text message is sent to notify the technician that the service or system has recovered.

Expert and NZFMA are continuing to develop this product and are increasing the market data that is collected.