In the past, all major participants in the energy market operated and maintained their IT infrastructure themselves in their own data centres - and to a large extent still do so today. But a rethink is taking place: Due to more complex requirements for availability, compliance and regulatory requirements, the demands on internal IT system landscapes are increasing. And as complexity increases, so do the costs.

Our customer, the international energy company Uniper SE, was faced with exactly this challenge. Due to the necessary change of its own data centre, the internal IT trading systems either had to be migrated to a new data centre or converted into software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. Uniper used this initial situation to move all existing leased lines - i.e. the direct connections to European energy trading centres and exchanges - to e*star and to simplify its own trading landscape.

Uniper's advantages in the cloud: short latencies, simple IT architecture, lower costs

Until now, Uniper had to operate its entire energy trading infrastructure in its own data centre. This infrastructure consists of a large number of exchange interfaces and a distributed internal trading platform. The exchanges in turn use different protocols and in some cases multicast connections, which are difficult and costly to integrate into their own networks.

Through the migration to the AWS cloud environment operated by e*star, all necessary connections are now managed and maintained by e*star. As it is hosted in Frankfurt am Main, the connections to the exchanges, which are also mostly located in Frankfurt, are short, so that latencies have no effect on the time-critical business processing in energy trading.

From the conception to the operation of the solution: everything from a single source

The e*star components used by Uniper - the Energy Trader, the Internal Market and the Market Adapter - are maintained by e*star and operated on behalf of the customer, which leads to reduced effort for the customer and increases availability. In addition, the overall IT architecture is simplified and costs are reduced. 

The advantages for Uniper at a glance

• Short latency to the exchanges
• Fewer incidents and downtimes
• Simplification of the internal system and network architecture.
• Reduction of internal administration effort
• Components are operated as a SaaS solution and maintained by e*star

Within the scope of the project, e*star took over the conception, set-up and operation of the trading environment in the cloud as well as the connection to the exchanges. This includes the operation of the development, test and productive platform, the operation of the leased lines to the EEX, NASDAQ and ICE or ICE ENDEX exchanges and the dimensions logging, monitoring, backup, security and documentation. In addition, e*star provides support for the AWS Cloud and the leased lines as well as a service desk in the 10/5 model.

The entire project, including the migration of the data and systems to the cloud, was realised during normal, intraday trading and without downtime - despite the high level of internal networking of the systems and the complex setup.