Stock exchange NYSE Euronext is deploying a 100Gbps network
from Ciena as part of its plans to improve bandwidth tenfold and
reduce latency in financial transactions. It hopes the increase in
speed and reduction in the time taken for transaction processing
the network promises to provide will enable it to take more
business from competitors.
The network will play a key role in NYSE Euronext's
communications backbone - the Secure Financial Transaction
Infrastructure (SFTI) network, which aims to give the exchange's
customers' access to a variety of financial services.
Last year the
NYSE replaced an Oracle IO relational database with a
datawarehousing appliance from Netezza, allowing it to conduct
rapid searches of 650Tbytes of data.
Andy Bach, senior vice-president for network communications at
NYSE, said the new network will lower latency by 70 milliseconds.
"This is a tremendous amount as our business is in high-frequency
trades. Whoever has the faster execution engine will get more
business. Reducing latency means more business for the NYSE."
The far reaching project has involved creatineg a 400,000 square
foot datacentre in New Jersey connected to four hubs using optical
fibre links. The links vary between 60km and 100km from the
datacentre and use dense wave division multiplexing to split white
light into its constituent colours, which are then used to transmit
data. Each fibre can handle up to 100bps of bandwidth and the
network can scale to up to 88 wavelengths transmitted
simultaneously. Bach said that when the site launches at the end of
the year, it will be using 800Gbps of bandwidth.
"It is critically important for NYSE Euronext in our dual role
as an exchange operator and technology company to ensure a
technology and operational infrastructure of the highest quality
and integrity, and to provide the highest levels of speed and
capacity, lowest latency and maximum flexibility," said Stanley
Young, CEO of NYSE Technologies and co-global CIO of NYSE
Euronext.
Bach and his team of network engineers have spent the past year
defining an architecture and selecting a partner to jointly define,
create and deploy a state-of-the-art network that would position
NYSE Euronext at the forefront of ultra-low-latency executions and
market data distribution, the exchange said.
Phase one of the project will go live in June, when Bach
switches the first NYSE network over from the existing 10Gbps
infrastructure onto the Ciena system.
Ciena's 100G technology will be a core infrastructure component
to support the growing bandwidth demands of NYSE Euronext's
state-of-the-art datacentres in New York and London. These
facilities are expected to be operational in 2010 and are designed
to serve as the company's operational hubs for more than one
billion daily transactions comprising petabytes of information.
The network uses Ciena's CN 4200 RS FlexSelect Advanced
multiplexor, which is capable of delivering a 100Gbps data stream
over a single wavelength.