MCX conducts seamless live trading from its DR site

Mumbai, September 14, 2016: As a part of its Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan (BC & DR Plan), Multi Commodity Exchange of India Ltd. (MCX), India’s No. 1 commodity exchange, successfully conducted live trading—both morning & evening sessions— from its disaster recovery site (DR site) in Delhi on September 12, 2016. The Exchange completed all the trading, surveillance, risk, clearing & settlement operations from its Business Continuity Site (BC site), which were in accordance with SEBI’s guidelines and mandates made applicable to commodity exchanges in April, 2016. Thereafter, regular trading resumed from the primary site from September 13, 2016 onwards.

The switch over to DR site and revert operations to primary site has been absolutely seamless with no changes required at market participants’ end. The market participants' connections, trading volumes, performance of the system during the day remained similar to any regular trading day from the primary site with no impact on any of its systems, data integrity, network and other services.

Live trading from DR site encompasses a host of complex processes, and involvement of stakeholders, which may result in some human errors. To overcome these risks, the exchange has automated the switch-over & switch-back processes.

Commenting on this important development, Mr. Mrugank Paranjape, MD & CEO, MCX said, “The successful completion of this exercise indicated that MCX’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan is resilient and the disaster recovery facility is fully functional and operational and therefore capable of carrying out all system critical processes in an eventuality. This move is part of MCX's efforts to provide its members with an efficient platform for trading.”

On the successful completion of live trading from DR site, Mr. Rahi Racharla, Chief Technology Officer, MCX said, “This move was intended to test the robustness of our systems and processes to withstand any disaster, and recover within the defined Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and thereby identify any gaps in our BC & DR Plan. We follow a stringent process of contingency planning to ensure that all mission critical functions can operate in the event of unforeseen circumstances.”

MCX has laid down a comprehensive BC & DR Plan as per the global best practices. It has also upgraded the IT infrastructure at DR site which is hosted in Data Center built and managed as per the international Tier-III specifications. The state-of-the-art DR site is a replica of the primary site which ensures that all the Exchange data is replicated on real time basis, hence the data is available from its DR site with near to zero RPO. The Exchange has also setup a near online site within Mumbai to achieve zero data loss in case of any eventuality.

The Exchange has been conducting market mock trading from its BC & DR Site in accordance with its approved BC & DR Plan during the last couple of months. In the near future, Exchange has planned to make its trading system live from DR site without any prior intimation to its members to mimic the real time disaster scenario.