Two of the US’s biggest trading venues, NYSE Euronext and Direct Edge, are upgrading their market data and messaging capabilities as the quest for lower latency and higher capacity continues apace.
NYSE Euronext has teamed up with connectivity firm Juniper Networks to design a low-latency network for the exchange’s new data centres in the London and New York metropolitan areas.
When created, the new data centres will be able to support a roundtrip latency of 50 microseconds and will be the primary operational infrastructure supporting several billion daily transactions and quotes across a range of asset classes and geographies. They are expected to be in operation by 2010 and will be a key part of NYSE Euronext’s efforts to consolidate its total number of data centres from 10 to four.
“Juniper’s simplified data centre approach will allow us to deploy a complete 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network with ultra-low latency at a substantial cost savings,” said Steve Rubinow, executive vice president and co-global CIO of NYSE Euronext, in a statement. “With Juniper, we are able to dramatically cut the cost and complexity of managing our data centre network today, while continuing to enhance our competitive position with a next-generation data centre fabric that will enable us to scale to tens of thousands of 10GbE ports.”
Meanwhile Direct Edge, the third-largest trading venue in the US by matched market share behind NYSE Euronext and Nasdaq, has chosen technology vendor 29 West’s Ultra Messaging for the Enterprise (UME) product as its high-speed messaging platform.
According to the two firms, the upgrade was required to handle Direct Edge’s growth in the last nine months. The platform’s matched market share of US equity trades rose to 12.5% in May 2009 from just under 5% in October 2008.
Direct Edge will use UME to integrate applications spanning the entire operation, from its front-end gateways to its matching engines to its back-end compliance systems. This is expected to result in lower system latency, increased throughput and greater resiliency.
Furthermore, Direct Edge and US options bourse the International Securities Exchange (ISE), which owns a 31.5% stake in Direct Edge, have both selected connectivity firm Telx to provide disaster recovery data centre services.
ISE and Direct Edge will jointly offer their member firms access to a new data centre capable of managing both ISE’s options exchange and Direct Edge’s two equity trading platforms, using the facilities management agreement between the two firms. Both venues expect to go live with Telx in 2010.
“Telx offers a multitude of network and connectivity options that will provide flexibility for both ISE’s and Direct Edge’s member firms,” said Daniel Friel, ISE’s chief information officer. “With their exceptional customer service and state-of-the art technology, we are confident that Telx’s customer-oriented approach will meet the unique needs of our customers.”