This notice is in reference to a mandatory MDN failover test along with information concerning MDN live ticker feed message comparisons.

Mandatory MDN Failover Test ~ 5/16/03

On Friday, May 16, 2003, at 4:45 p.m. Central Daylight Time, CME will conduct a mandatory failover test.  The purpose of this test is to ensure that in the case of an MDN outage at our primary facility (Wacker Drive); you can switch appropriately to the MDN supported out of the back-up facility at CME’s Remote Data Center (RDC).  In an effort to verify that our gateway distribution is balanced effectively, we will be removing your back-up/test/development logins from CME’s primary location shortly after conducting this test – consequently it is critical that you participate in this failover test.

Details of the Test:

At approximately 4:45 p.m. (CDT), CME will bring down the MDN gateways at our Wacker (primary) location.   If your connection to the RDC is working properly, then you should continue to receive data from the RDC.  After a fifteen-minute period, we will bring up the MDN gateways at our primary location.  We will send line integrity verification messages over channel’s one, two and three during that time period.  We will send some retransmission data for the day over channel four.    This will give you the opportunity to make sure your back-up connections work in this situation.

Email Results:

We would like you to email us with your test results.  If you do not do so, we will have to assume that everything went well at your end and that we can proceed with our plans as mentioned in the first paragraph.  The test results should be emailed to Marilee Radecki at mradecki@cme.com.

Live Feed Comparison Issue

Since the MDN at the RDC is a completely separate network from the MDN at the Wacker Drive location, it is important that if you do live feed comparisons between the two that you do your comparisons on a message level rather than at a sequence number level.  We purposely have these two independent networks for failover capabilities.  If you are comparing the two connections by using sequence numbers, there could be a situation where the two feeds are out-of-sequence. 

For questions regarding this notice, please contact one of the following individuals:

Marilee Radecki                    312-930-8193           mradecki@cme.com

Lisa Amato                            312-338-2654           lamato@cme.com