Scottrade announces implementation of new, world-class data center

The $25 million facility is the largest technology investment in Scottrade’s history

St. Louis - Scottrade, a leading online investment firm, announced today that it has completed the design, renovation and migration to a new, state-of-the-art Data Center located in suburban St. Louis. The project included a major redesign of the firm’s IT infrastructure.

The new Data Center was constructed in an existing building that has since been renovated to become one of the most advanced data centers in the country. The Data Center will allow Scottrade to continue to grow its business and meet the needs of its customers by being capable of processing up to one million transactions per day.

“This is the largest investment in new technology that Scottrade has ever made,” said Rodger Riney,“ president and CEO of Scottrade. ”We have seen remarkable growth in recent years and this data center will allow our technology and customer base to continue to expand at the rate we expect"

The 34,000-square-foot facility features:

* Fully-redundant electrical, mechanical and cooling systems to ensure that the facility will be able to sustain operations for an extended period in the event of electrical power loss
* Exterior physical and electronic security that will pre-screen approaching visitors
* An elaborate interior screening system including security man-traps, card-key-enabled checkpoints and motion-activated surveillance cameras. Biometric components, including palm scanners, will control access to particularly critical areas.

“The successful completion of the Data Center can be credited to our team here at Scottrade and the dedicated work of our business partners,” said Scottrade Chief Information Officer Ian Patterson, who spearheaded the project. “This Data Center will allow Scottrade to continue to provide our customers with the service and technology they have come to expect.”

Development of the Data Center was a joint effort between Scottrade, Cisco, EMC, Dell and Microsoft. In less than 12 months, Scottrade and its business partners completed the build-out and migration - a very short timeframe that added to the difficulty of the project.

The project, which is nearing completion of the second phase, was designed by Cisco’s Advanced Services, a worldwide organization within Cisco that helps customers achieve a high-performance network with high availability and security while reducing total cost of ownership.

“The new Scottrade Data Center is an advanced deployment that will provide significant productivity benefits to the company and its customers,” said Doug Gourlay, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s Data Center Technology Group. “Powering this mission-critical data center are more than 50 Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches which offer high-density 10-gigabit connectivity with advanced load balancing and security features, in addition to a wide range of other Cisco switching and routing products. This scalable network investment, with the capacity to process more than one million trade executions per day, allows Scottrade to add more features to its trading systems and continue to provide a high level of service to customers worldwide.”

Scottrade’s corporate headquarters remains in the St. Louis, Mo., suburb of Des Peres. Scottrade has 297 offices nationwide.