For some brokerages, October 27 is a nightmare from which they are still trying to awaken. These brokerages were caught unprepared for the record 1.2 billion shares that traded hands that day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dove 554 points only to shoot back up the next day. Others survived the high volume day with no downtime, but nevertheless sobered by how close they came.

Why did some brokerages experience long delays in processing transactions during peak periods while others passed the stress test with flying colors? Why did the response time of some brokerages slow down to a snail's pace while the order flow of others went uninterrupted? The answers are complicated, but a common denominator to each situation is one or more finely tuned Skyline processors from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).

In the highly confidential world of Wall Street computing-where even small innovations translate into significant competitive advantage-brokerages keep their computing configurations and performance strategies close to the vest. Nevertheless, a number of Wall Street computer jockeys and analysts attributed their success last October to Skyline bandwidth and horsepower that handled wildly oscillating workloads. Their close reading of historical milestones alerted these brokerages in advance that high-end IT solutions were needed. Speaking strictly off the record, these professionals recounted preparations that had two elements in common: Hitachi Data Systems' Skyline computing platform and PerfMan, the systems management software from The Information Systems Manager (ISM). Perfman from ISM, a Bethlehem, PA-based provider, provides a suite of integrated enterprise-wide performance management and capacity planning solutions for MVS, Windows NT, and UNIX systems.

Indeed, a significant number of the brokerages and securities firms, who were scored highest by customers and regulators in October, 1997 were powered by Hitachi Skyline systems. These systems, in turn, were supported before and after deployment by the systems management features of PerfMan, In each of these cases, the fine tuning offered by ISM's PerfMan services ensured that the brokerages had sufficient computer capacity to weather the coming.

Hitachi and ISM
The ISM software provides a service that Hitachi's Wall Street customers find compelling, according to Steve Gordon, Hitachi Consulting Systems Engineer in New York. "As an SE, my job is to profile the workloads of our customers' systems, model their hardware configurations, and assess their system performance requirements. ISM offers customers a fast, accurate, and reliable way to do this. It gives Hitachi quick access to customer performance data and allows us to quickly show the customers possibilities they didn't see before, demonstrating the added value of HDS," Gordon said.

Fortunately for one of Gordon's key accounts, October 1997 turned out to be a good month to put its Hitachi Skyline into production, based on an ISM study showing the benefits of moving the production environment. The securities firm had operated the Skyline for close to a year in its development environment.

"It was a propitious move," agreed the firm's CIO. "ISM showed me how the Skyline would benefit us in advance of any volume peaks by ensuring that the performance boosts to our online workloads would translate into excess capacity the company could tap for unanticipated needs." The investment paid off because, less than a year later, on August 31, 1998, volume topped one billion trades. The Hitachi system, tuned by PerfMan, performed flawlessly. "Who ever thought that a billion transaction day would be a non-event?" the CIO asked.

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