CiscoLive -- Across the global financial markets industry, new trading strategies, fragmented liquidity venues, and requirements for highest trading execution are driving the need for optimal reliability, predictability and ultra-low-latency connected data centers. Delays to transactions -- even fractions of seconds -- can cost millions of dollars, prompting the most successful investment firms to seek out stock exchanges that have the highest performing networks. To meet these needs, The NASDAQ OMX Group, the world's No. 1 provider of technology to exchanges, clearinghouses and regulators, has selected the Cisco Data Center Business Advantage portfolio to evolve NASDAQ OMX PHLX, the Philadelphia-based, high-performance options trading exchange.

NASDAQ OMX PHLX has selected Cisco's Data Center Business Advantage portfolio, the foundation of Cisco's financial markets-specific high performance trading fabric, as the infrastructure for its options trading exchange and its evolving data center architecture. NASDAQ OMX PHLX has deployed the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches and the Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extender (FEX), which provides scalability and a simplified, single point of management capability.

Additionally, users have seen significant performance improvement, including reduced latency and jitter, and a greater ability to scale capacity while maintaining high-performance. This new Cisco deployment adds to previously deployed financial markets solutions for switching, routing, security and collaboration within other NASDAQ OMX environments.

Cisco serves as a NASDAQ OMX strategic technology provider to ensure continual leading-edge services to the organization's customers, and has collaborated closely with NASDAQ OMX to help ensure its data centers offer growth, scalability, virtualization, and the highest reliability and performance.