Through a three-year contract extension, the Nasdaq electronic stock market has upgraded a Hewlett-Packard system that processes about 2.6 million trades and distributes about 7.5 million price quotes each day, HP announced Monday. Nasdaq switched 500 processors in the system, a relatively exotic HP NonStop machine, from MIPS s86000 to newer MIPS s88000 models. Eventually, Nasdaq will switch to Intel Itanium processors, HP said.
Nasdaq also uses HP OpenView software to manage and monitor the system, and HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System for data storage. NonStop systems, originally sold by a company called Tandem, have run the core of Nasdaq since 1982. Compaq Computer acquired Tandem in 1997, and HP acquired Compaq in 2002.
