The National Stock Exchange’s data centre at Kohinoor City in Mumbai’s Kurla suburb is under the scanner following a massive technical glitch on February 24 this year, a BusinessLine report has suggested.

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The snag led to an abrupt halt in trading as the exchange shut down for four hours. Interestingly, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) calls the data centre a Disaster Recovery (DR) site, located just a few kilometres from its main Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) main data centre.

The report further stated that the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is investigating whether a part of NSE’s “index calculation and clearing operations” were being conducted from Kohinoor City data centre instead of its leading site, and also, if the blackout took place between 10.05 am and 10.07 am.

The NSE spokesperson refused to comment on the episode and share the technical details at this stage.

What caused the problem?

On February 24, the shutdown of India’s largest bourse began with ‘calculation of index data’ in the Bank Nifty, and Nifty indices at 10.07 am. Both indices were not getting updated correctly till up to 11.40 am, after which the NSE halted trading fully. Otherwise, there were no broker objections about the connectivity issues between 10.07 am and 11.40 am at NSE’s BKC site, which ‘disseminates’ data to stockbrokers, news channels and wire services

The curious story of co-location vs data centre

In August 2009, the NSE bought 28,000 sq ft to 80,000 sq ft office space at Kohinoor City to incorporate its growing technology infrastructure. At that time, Ravi Narain and Chitra Ramakrishna were heading the NSE, which was just four months short of starting co-location trading. Also, the co-location servers had to be placed at BKC only, for proximity to NSE’s order matching engine, where part of other data centre work was advanced to Kohinoor City.

The report quoted sources as saying that data reproduction between the NSE’s leading site and the DR hadn’t happened even after 30 minutes of trading time loss.

On March 4, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had directed market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India to submit its investigation report in 21 days. On February 25, the NSE said: “It had multiple telecom links with two service providers to ensure redundancy, and we received the communication of instability of all their links from both the service providers. While there was no impact on the trading system, this instability affected the online risk management system”.

(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)