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Here’s a roundup of data center headlines from around the world – Singapore, South Africa and Australia:

• ACTIV expands to Equinix Singapore.  Equinix (EQIX) announced last week that ACTIV Financial, a provider of market data content and technologies, will expand operations to Equinix’s Singapore International Business Exchange (IBX) data center as a part of its global expansion.  Being in close proximity to the major trading venues and exchanges in Asia allows ACTIV to provide customers with low latency access to its high-volume market data services.  ACTIV currently leverages Equinix facilities in Chicago, New York, Frankfurt and London.  “ACTIV delivers more than one million updates per second including hard to process content such as equity options depth feeds, order book data, and the latest feeds from exchanges around the world,” said Timothy Neo, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, ACTIV Financial.
• Photo tour of the Polaris Data Centre. Australian iTnews has a photo gallery of the Polaris Data Centre, built in the newly-developed town of Springsfield, Queensland.  The five story, $241 million data centre is among five data centres shortlisted by the Australian Federal Government.  The facility opened in January 2009 and houses equipment from companies such as NEC, HP, Suncorp and others.  Polaris was designed for 20 megawatts at full capacity, holds 1.5 million litres of water in onsite water tans, and is served by a dual ring of diverse dark fibre.  The iTnews article contains photos inside the Queensland data centre.
• PIPE International selects Equinix Sydney.  Equinix (EQIX) announced that PIPE International has selected it as a key interconnect provider for its new PIPE Pacific Cable (PPC-1) undersea cable.  PIPE is also currently located in Equinx data centers in Tokyo and San Jose.  The newly laid PPC-1 undersea cable runs 6,900 km from Guam to the Equinix Sydney campus and has a capacity of 2.56 terabits per second.  “The new PPC-1 cable system will also enable our customers to increase the resilience of their international network and provide additional redundancy,” said Samuel Lee, President, Equinix Asia Pacific.
• TeleHouse launches data center in South Africa. TELEHOUSE Europe, a subsidiary of KDDI announced that they will open the data center TELEHOUSE CAPE TOWN in Cape Town, Republic of South Africa.  KDDI is a large Japanese telecommunications provider that has been growing its business in developing countries; including a recent partnership with Bangladeshi bracNet.  TELEHOUSE Europe is a part of KDDI Group’s European local subsidiary and will be the first data center opened by a Japanese telecommunications carrier in Africa.  The new data center is based on a partnership between TELEHOUSE Europe and Teraco Data Environments, the first carrier-neutral data center in South Africa.

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Roundup: Equinix, Telehouse, Polaris

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Trading on the London Stock Exchange has been halted by a technical problem with its primary electronic gateways. The outage, which has been blamed on connectivity problems with the exchange’s trading gateways, highlights the critical importance of electronic trading systems in the normal function of the global financial markets. All trades in London have been placed in an “auction call period” in which buy orders are matched to sellers, but the deal does not actually go through until the period ends. LSE has yet to announce when this “uncrossing time” will be. Detailed updates are available on the stock exchange’s incident communication page.

See The Register, Bloomberg and MarketWatch for additional details and updates. Stock markets in the U.S. are closed today for the Thanksgiving holiday.

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Tech Problems Halt London Stock Exchange

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As NYSE Euronext pushes deeper into data center services, many industry-watchers are gauging the impact upon the market for low-latency colocation in Northern New Jersey. Colocation providers say the larger role for the NYSE and other exchanges will bring further segmentation to a fast-growing market, and predict that traders will continue to seek require colocation partners beyond the NYSE.

Securities analysts are keenly interested in whether NYSE Euronext’s new data center in New Jersey will disrupt the status quo for providers like Savvis, Equinix and Switch and Data, which have invested heavily in large data center in north Jersey, supported by strong demand for high frequency trading.

“I don’t think this is a winner take all market,” said Phil Koen, the CEO of Savvis (SVVS), in the company’s recent earnings call. “I just don’t buy into that belief. I think you can have a bifurcation between what I’ll call exchange-captive centers and venue-neutral centers.”

‘A Lot of Activity Here’
“In the grand scheme of things, there is going to be room for the NASDAQs and the NYSEs and the Equinixes and the other players in this field, because there is a lot of activity here,” said Equinix CEO Stephen Smith. “We have a very small percentage of this market. There are thousands of these companies looking for places to deploy this gear. And so we just don’t see any impact on that, specifically from the New York Stock Exchange.”

Wall Street analysts aren’t so sure. Although the NYSE’s colocation offering will be more expensive, its cutting-edge network will offer some of the fastest connections in a speed-hungry industry.

“According to our industry checks, the new NYSE Euronext data center is increasing competition in the financial services markets,” said a recent research report from Canaccord Adams. “Customers are researching the new product and it appears to be causing hesitation within the customer base.

“While speed is a factor, our checks are indicating that the NYSE is charging 3-7x what Savvis would charge for proximity hosting,” the report added. “Are the microseconds of speed worth the cost? Probably for the larger high speed trading firms, but it will not be for less active traders.”

Low Latency Arms Race in NJ
The accelerating arms race in high frequency trading is a major driver for the growth of the data center business in northern New Jersey. Equinix (EQIX) is building out the final phase of its huge NY4 data center in Secaucus, and has announced plans to acquire Switch & Data (SDXC), which is building out a financial data center in North Bergen. Meanwhile, Savvis has announced a major expansion of its Weehawken trading hub.

In its most recent earnings report, Savvis disclosed that two financial customers would be departing its Weehawken facility, but said it expected to replace them and emphasized the overall health of its high-frequency trading business.

“The fact of the matter is that we’re a real player and we have already a lot of gravity just by the way of whom we already have in that facility,” said Koen. “So unlike a greenfield (data center) experience where you always have the ‘chicken and egg’ problem, we don’t have that.”

Trading Ecosystem Has Value
Equinix, which specializes in peering, said its business model offered access to a huge ecosystem of connectivity providers and trading specialists.

“The network neutrality and network density that we have is a whole different proposition than what NYSE can offer to their end clients,” said Smith. “You would have to ask NYSE how they’re doing on their (customer) builds. But we are accumulating at a pretty rapid pace some very key trading venues, matching engines and execution venues that are going to be attracting lots of members coming in.

“We are watching all those activities pretty closely and quite frankly, I have seen no impact to the business to date,” said Smith.

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Can High Frequency Colo Support Many Players?

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NYSE Euronext says it has already pre-sold more than 20,000 square feet of colocation space in its new data center in northern New Jersey, reflecting strong interest in the exchange’s expansion into the data center services arena. The new facility, which opens next year, is the engine driving NYSE Euronext’s transformation into a technology platform for high-speed trading.

“We really see our data centers as the future of our market,” said Stanley Young, CEO of NYSE Technologies and co-global CIO of NYSE Euronext (NYX). “To show how vital this is, we have pre-sold space in that data center a year before our matching engines come online.”

Young discussed the NYSE’s new data centers and the role they play in its business during a panel as it hosted a recent energy efficiency summit with The Green Grid. Young said the 400,000 square foot data center in Mahwah will include 170,000 square feet of raised-floor data center space.

Large Footprint for Colocation
But NYSE Euronext will require just 20 percent of that space for its own infrastructure, Young said. The rest will be available for lease to trading firms seeking high-speed access to the servers – known as “matching engines” – that execute electronic trades.

In the increasingly data-driven environment on Wall Street, access to those servers has enormous value. “For our data center space I can get a multiple of three times what normal data center vendors can get for that space due to the proximity to the matching engines,” said Young. “You can see how valuable that real estate becomes.”

The Data Center as ‘Virtual Marketplace’
That has changed NYSE Euronext’s approach to its business. “We think of our data centers as the exchanges used to think of our trading floors years ago,” said Young. “What we’re seeing with our data centers is that we’re creating that virtual marketplace.

“We’ve actually changed our model,” he continued. “We’re moving from being a place where transactions occur to being what we call a fabric player. We allow industry participants to meet virtually and we get paid for that. That model is now driving all of our thinking.”

This evolution follows decades of market changes that have altered the primacy of the NYSE’s trading floor, once the iconic image of stock trading in the U.S. The emergence of computer-driven trading venues like the NASDAQ market has created a more diverse and competitive trading ecosystem.

Building A Platform Through Acquisitions
These forces have shaped NYSE Euronext’s adoption of technology to extend its reach as the rise of electronic trading shifted a growing percentage of financial trades to loe-latency platforms. In early 2006 the NYSE acquired electronic trading platform Archipelago Holdings to become a public company, and then expanded globally with a deal to buy EuroNext in 2007. 

The NYSE built its technology warchest with acquisitions of trading platform management specialists TransactTools (2006) and Wombat Financial (2008). It is currently in the process of consolidating these tools into a single Universal Trading Platform for the exchange and its partners.

NYSE Euronext sees this infrastructure – including the data center, network fabric and trading platform -as  its competitive edge in the new Wall Street. 

“In our business model we get paid by the transaction,” Young said. “(The number of) trades executed is a big revenue driver. If our market share is under pressure, being able to extend our platform becomes an important part of replacing our revenue from lost transactions.”

The Primacy of Power
As the activity shifts from the exchange post to the matching engine, those transactions are viewed in terms that matter most in the data center – the amount of power consumed.

“Our real business is power consumption and capacity of compute,” said Young. “That is our bread and butter. We sell space in our data centers by the kilowatt. We meter people’s cabinets. The more (trading) they do in those cabinets and the hotter they run, the more we earn. The cost of power is getting down to where people are making trading decisions based on it.”

That trend drove NYSE Euronext’s decision to get into the data center business, building its own facilities in northern New Jersey and London to anchor a next-generation trading operation. “We were running out of power, and had to look at our data centers, our trading floors for the future,” said Young. “We had to make some strategic decisions to build new data centers. It was critically important.”

Building From Scratch
At the time, NYSE Euronext operated out of data centers it leased from third parties. “When we looked around, there was nothing available that met the needs of our markets and business at all, so we decided to build from scratch,” said Young. “That gave us the opportunity to look at every single piece of green technology that was available in order to build these data centers as efficiently as we could.”

Young says billions of transactions every day will flow through the New Jersey facility, known internally as a “liquidity hub” rather than a data center. “You can understand why we build these data centers to 2N+1,” he said. “Everything is double backed up, at least.”

The facility will be able to support power densities of up to 14 kilowatts per cabinet. The company is using a modular design so it can deploy new space as needed.

The NYSE is focused on managing its power, but some popular efficiency measures are non-starters for the NYSE, including virtualization. “We can’t virtualize our trading engines because they’re running full blast all the time,” said Young. “What we’re starting to look into is putting shared memory access onto a matching engine.”

Looking at RDMA as Accelerator
NYSE has also worked with Cisco Systems on an Ethernet-based trading solution using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) accelerators to reduce latency between compute nodes. RDMA allows data to move directly from the memory of one computer into that of another without involving either one’s operating system. Young says this technology  could result in latency of 10 to 15 microseconds when used over 100 gigabit Ethernet connections.

“Our world is a world where microseconds count,” said Young. “My users measure my abilty to serve them in tens of microseconds, and if they had the technology they would get down to nanoseconds.”

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NYSE Euronext’s Future: The Data Center

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It takes a lot of processing power to keep the digital economy humming. That’s why Visa Inc. (V) has opened a large new data center in the eastern United States, which the company called a “key milestone” in strengthening the disaster recovery capabilities for a global credit card operation that processes $4.3 trillion in transactions each year.

The new data center is a 370,000 square foot facility with more than 140,000 square feet of raised floor space. Visa did not disclose the location of the data center, which contains authorization engines that can process hundreds of millions of transactions daily at speeds of up to 10,000 transaction messages per second.

Visa’s new facility completes a global network of four data centers on three continents connecting more than 16,000 financial institutions. It also provides Visa with two “synchronized, secure and reliable data centers” in North America, which the company says are each capable of carrying Visa’s entire global payments volume in the event of a natural disaster or systems outage. The failover from one data center to another will be instant, the company says.

The additional capacity is driven by the growing worldwide migration away from cash and checks and towards electronic payments, which now account for 33 percent of global consumer spending. Visa said it expects the volume and complexity of transactions to continue to grow, particularly as mobile payments become more popular.

“Visa’s commitment to continuous technology upgrades differentiates us from competitors and helps Visa play a key role in facilitating the migration to electronic payments,” said Mike Dreyer, Chief Information Officer, Visa Inc. “As we activate our second new data center in four years and complete a transition to the latest information technology, we are laying the foundation for the future of Visa payments and related services.”

Visa is also implementing a new operating system for its transaction processing netrwork, known as VisaNet. The z Transaction Processing Facility (z/TPF), is a 64-bit operating system developed with IBM that allows more information to be manipulated at once and perform more complex processing functions in milliseconds.

Before launching the new data center, Visa conducted network “stress testing” designed to simulate extremely heavy transaction loads. The stress test, conducted in an IBM facility configured to match an operational Visa data center, found that VisaNet’s new configuration has sufficient capacity and processing power to support the busiest hour of the busiest day projected for the year, even if an entire data center was to go offline.

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Visa Opens Large East Coast Data Center

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Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

• Hibernia Atlantic expands to two Equinix data centers. Submarine transport cable provider Hibernia Atlantic announced Tuesday the expansion of its Global Financial Network(GFN) into the Equinix New York-2 and New York-4 data centers in Secaucus, New Jersey.  The expansion from Hibernia aims to provide low latency, redundancy and connectivity to global banks and exchanges in the New York metro area.  Hibernia’s GFN spans 24,000 Kilometers (14,913 miles) of fiber optic cables across key financial cities around the world.  “Our continued GFN expansion in New York metro and in other major financial centers reflects our core commitment to provide ‘security through diversity’—our company philosophy that offers world-class, redundant solutions to our financial customers,” said Bob McMann, VP of Provisioning and Procurement for Hibernia
• Switch & Data selected by Pragma Securities. Switch & Data announced that Pragma Securities, a trading solutions provider has selected their New York Financial EcoCenter to optimize the performance of its quantitative trading solution.  After an extensive diligence process Pragma selected the North Bergen, New Jersey data center to host its trading execution services, and will be one cross connect away from the other electronic trading customers in the site.
• Nimsoft introduces alliance program. Following the October launch of their Unified Monitoring Solutions, Nimsoft announced their charter members in the Unified Monitoring Alliance Tuesday.  The new monitoring solution provides a total, unified view of both internal and external IT resources.  The Unified Monitoring Alliance partners are made up of service providers, solution partners and technology development partners.  Partners like FusionStorm, Ingram Micro, Shavlik, Service-now.com, Rackspace and many others are among the first to join the alliance.  “The alliance not only expands opportunities for growth and collaborative innovation for our partners, but also effectively increases the breadth and depth of the systems monitoring and management solutions that Nimsoft offers to its customers,” said Nimsoft President Gary Read said
• The Planet signs Ayuda Networks. The Planet announced Tuesday that Ayuda Networks has signed on to join the company’s recently launched Partner Plus program.  Ayuda Networks consults with clients to evaluate connectivity requirements and implement the best solutions for their specific business.  Ayuda will add The Planet to its portfolio of top-tier solution providers and include them in recommendations to clients evaluating managed and dedicated hosting, as well as colocation services.

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Roundup: Equinix, Switch & Data, The Planet

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Lexent Metro Connect has completed an “ultra low latency” dark fiber connection between two Equinix data centers in Secaucus, New Jersey and major carrier hotels in Manhattan, providing even faster connections for Equinix’ growing high-speed trading ecosystem. The new dark fiber route follows the shortest distance across the Hudson River to key Manhattan connectivity hubs at 60 Hudson Street, 32 Avenue of the America, 75 Broad Street and 111 Eighth Avenue.

Equinix (EQIX) said the new link will offer route latency of less than 100 microseconds between its NY2 and NY4 facilities in Secaucus and Manhattan, enabling global banks, financial exchanges and other enterprises on Lexent’s fiber optic backbone to link with the traders, market data providers and technology utilities operating in the NY4 and NY2 centers.

“By utilizing Lexent Metro Connect, the financial community operating within our NY4 and NY2 centers in Secaucus can tap into fast, high-quality dark fiber routes to securely access New York’s carrier hotels,” said John Knuff, director of business development for Equinix. “This provides them with optimized, low-latency links to New York City’s financial exchanges and other key investment buildings.”

The new fiber link illustrates the accelerating arms race in low latency trading, which is a major driver for the growth of the data center business in northern New Jersey. Equinix is building out the final phase of its huge NY4 data center in Secaucus, while Savvis has announced a major expansion of its Weehawken trading hub and NYSE Euronext is building a huge data center in Mahwah to expand its colocation services for traders. 

“Latency is arguably one of the most important factors driving financial firms’ metro network decisions today,” said Ray La Chance, President and CEO of Lexent Metro Connect. “We have seen a surge in financial firms requesting private dark fiber solutions utilizing shorter optical routes, and with no mid-span equipment. In response, Lexent has built upon its core regional dark fiber footprint, removing the ‘fiber variable’ and allowing its clients to deploy latency optimized applications unparalleled by comparable carrier solutions.”

Cabling image by Sugree via Flickr.

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Equinix Plugs Into Even Lower Latency

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