BP Energy rolls out blade desktops for trading floor

December 27, 2002 (Computerworld)

BP Energy Co., which last month said that it has deployed a blade client infrastructure for desktop computing in support of its Calgary, Alberta, energy trading floor, is now considering the architecture for its trading floor in Houston.
The project, which cost Houston-based BP about $250,000, brought an immediate return on investment by cutting maintenance costs, eliminating the need for more expensive furniture on the new trading floor and reducing the need for more expensive technology, such as multiple CPUs underneath each trading floor desktop.
"From an operational point of view, we've shrunk the envelope of potential problems and simplified the service model to the point where everyone gets customized services but in a bulk format where we can deliver it economically," Greg Miller, manager of infrastructure at BP Energy, said earlier this month.
In November, BP completed building the new Calgary-based trading operation, which will be used for energy, gas and commodity trading.
"Now the technician does not have to crawl under the desk to service the desktop," Miller said. "They go to the computer room, pull the blade out, put a new one in and reboot it."
While blade technology has few downsides, analysts say there has been significant resistance to the move from end users who don't like losing control over their PCs, which has slowed the adoption of blade desktop technology.
Avivah Litan, a financial services analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said that although blade desktop computing in financial services is cutting-edge, the push to consolidate desktop computing into data centers is actually several years old.
Consolidating desktops into a data center environment not only improves service and reduces space needs, but it also improves security by cutting back on viruses and unauthorized software often downloaded by end users, Litan said.
"I think certainly if a major company like BP Energy is doing this and people hear about it, there are going to be more companies looking into it," Litan said.
Larry Tabb, an analyst at TowerGroup in Needham, Mass., said the use of blade architecture for desktop computing is a particularly good fit for trading floors, "where cost reduction and availability are primary concerns and where space comes at a premium."
BP's Calgary trading floor is a prototype site for the rest of the company. Its 100 blade clients cost $2,500 each, including installation and software. The company is also considering mirroring the blades to a disaster recovery site on the campus of SAIT University in Calgary.
Miller said BP used blade clients from ClearCube Technology in Austin, Texas, because it offered a more complete package of technology.
Other vendors' products were either underpowered, came with insufficient application support, or the servers, backplanes and multistreaming video interfaces were all sold by separate vendors, he said.
"It was just going to be a lot of effort to keep all those products and processes lined up and working the way you need to in a high-stress, highly abusive environment like a trading room," Miller said.
ClearCube's blades use commodity Intel processors, memory and hard drives, and are contained in stackable racks. End users connect to the blades through ClearCube's command ports, which also contain connections for peripheral devices such as monitors and keyboards and can be located as far as 200 yards from the blade servers.
The ClearCube architecture also allowed BP to support its multiple network needs by providing both private and public network connections to the trading workstations without increasing the amount of deployed desktops.
"For our trading unit in Houston, I think if we get to the point where our existing machinery starts to phase out, we'd certainly look at this very strongly. It would be very high on the operations list," Miller said.