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Carrier Services
NYSE Euronext: network latency is not an option
Adopts 100 Gbps networking to keep pace with ongoing global growth
by Sean Buckley
It’s really no surprise that for a financial industry house like NYSE Euronext—one of the largest financial exchange groups—network reliability and uptime are always key factors when considering any new telecom technology.
And while network uptime is important for NYSE Euronext, the need to expand capacity and reduce latency are becoming even more pressing issues.
In fact, competitiveness in the financial sector overall is no longer measured in milliseconds, but in microseconds.
With the focus on reducing time in any part of its process, Andy Bach, SVP and Global Head of Communications for NYSE Euronext, says that any latency could be lost business. “In our industry, latency equates to a large extent market share,” he said. “He who connects the order faster gets the order, so anything we can do to speed that up is a good thing.”
Traditionally using 10 Gbps service provider connections, a number of factors, including increasing customer access for 10 GbE, global trading expansion, data volume increases and global alliances drove it to look at new alternatives.
The only solution that could resolve those two issues is to make a move to 100 Gigabit networking. Forgoing the traditional carrier services route, NYSE is building two network centers. These two data centers, which will be network-live but not ready for servers initially, are set to be completed in September and October/November respectively, and will support 100 Gbps.
Traditionally, NYSE Euronext was leasing 10 Gbps circuits from various service providers to go in and out of its data centers to connect to the Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI) network and to its domestic US, Europe and other global sites.
For the large data center it’s building in New Jersey, NYSE Euronext is installing dark fiber that it is either purchasing from other carriers or building itself. The connections going into these data centers are from a mixed mode of both leased fibers and NYSE’s own facilities. What drove the financial house’s choice to go with dark fiber versus carrier wavelengths was relatively simple said Bach: “economics.”
“If you needed more than 4-8 10 Gbps waves, chances are you could probably cut a dark fiber deal and put some Ciena equipment on or whoever your favorite equipment vendor is and light it up and you’re better off economically to do that,” he said. “In our case, when we looked at the bandwidth growth curve, it continues to be aggressive and we would burn through many 10 Gigabit waves so it drove the economics to go with dark fiber.”
Riding the wave
Once NYSE Euronext felt comfortable with its decision to go with dark fiber versus buying wavelengths off of other carriers, the next step was to determine how much capacity it needed for its two network data centers.
Foreseeing an aggressive growth curve, Bach and his team concluded after again looking at the latency differences and the capacity that 100 Gbps was the answer.
“When you start talking about tens of 10 Gig waves, you ask how long is that really going to last me,” he said. “In our case, we took a look at the latency differences and the growth capacity overall really drove us to chasing the 100 Gbps solution.”
In evaluating 100 Gbps solutions, Bach looked at some standard metrics to determine what vendor would be the best fit.
After conducting a traditional paper search on what vendor’s optical platform could support 100 Gbps, it moved onto the second part of its evaluation which was to look at various other factors: price, performance, and technology.
When it came to price, Bach said that it would have to be a general metric of being 2 ˝ times the price of a 40 Gbps system. “Most of the vendors will come in at about that price although everyone has their own special deals on how to price it,” he said. “Pricing in that respect starts to drop out a little bit from the equation when you know they will be close enough.”
Upon weeding out the pricing issues, NYSE Euronext looked at reliability and technology. When it came to technology, the dominant metric was the platform’s ability to shrink latency.
In the end, NYSE Euronext found that the best platform that shrunk latency was Ciena’s RS FlexSelect advanced services platform, which claims it can deliver 100 Gbps data stream over one wavelength.
Figure 1.
What’s more, the Ciena platform allows the financial house to run 100 Gbps with existing 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps wavelengths on the same system.
While Bach could not give exact apples to apples comparisons on how Ciena stacked up against its competition due to NDAs, he said that the vendor outshined its competition.
“Shaving microseconds is an exciting thing in my world these days,” Bach said. “At that point we looked at a couple of different vendors and it turned out that Ciena really seemed to have a better quality offering in terms of performance.”
Maintaining control
Having a service provider manage its capacity has never necessarily been an issue, but building and maintaining these new facilities themselves does allow NYSE Euronext to be in the driver’s seat of how they manage the network.
“It’s more control and it’s the ability to decide whether to put in 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps, or 100 Gbps at our discretion,” Bach said. “It really becomes all of our decision.”
Bach added that even though NYSE Euronext is on target with its deployment, since 100 Gbps is “cutting edge technology, I can temporarily run a few 40 Gbps links which are a little bit more mature.”
So where is the NYSE Euronext now in the 100 Gbps deployment cycle?
At this point, NYSE Euronext will bring up some existing legs on its existing fiber routes starting sometime this month. From there it will take it from the testing labs and start running.
By September, Bach says 100 Gbps networking will be in full production mode at the two new data centers in New York and in the UK.
But 100 Gbps networking won’t be limited to just its two new data centers. NYSE Euronext will incorporate the technology on the SFTI network to deal with increased capacity needs.
“Capacity starts to go up, and in fact we have been acquiring more and more dark fiber legs on SFTI,” explained Bach. “At the moment we have been taking the dark fiber and lighting it with 10 Gbps connections between two routers. As we need more capacity in goes the DWDM gear.”
If anything, the latest deployment for NYSE Euronext of 100 Gbps could be a precursor of the kinds of applications that service providers and large enterprises are going to fill the pipe with.
Making a move to 100 Gbps may be seen by some as bleeding edge, but it represents the idea that the financial industry has never been afraid to try and take a chance on new technology.
“The financial community has always been a very early adopter of telecommunications technology, whether it is signaling semaphores, telegraphs or telephone,” Bach said. “If you look at pictures of the Wall Street area in the late-1800s there were already telephone poles bending over from all the cabling on them.”
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