
Inside Equinix's NY4 data center where Wall Street trades - dodders
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-13/inside-equinix-s-ny4-data-center-where-wall-street-trades
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elecengin
I've been to NY4! It really is less magical then these articles make it seem.
Yes - the security is a bit imposing. For anyone familiar with datacenters,
though, it is pretty run of the mill except for it's tremendous scale.

Worth shouting out to Lucera - I have met the CEO and he is a really
thoughtful technologist. They are doing some awesome work bringing AWS-style
computing to the low latency space. Some interesting details on their
deployment: [http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/02/20/amazon-cant-
catch-l...](http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/02/20/amazon-cant-catch-lucera-
financial-cloud/)

~~~
chasb
If high-frequency trading were limited or abolished, would Lucera's advantage
over AWS disappear?

~~~
puppetmaster
Not really. Even in a world where HFT is limited, cross connections provide
consistent connections between trading entities. While AWS provides over-the-
Internet or "black boxed" networking on a best efforts basis, Lucera's
connections are point to point.

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chollida1
If you are at all into this sort of thing( data centers) and you ever get a
chance to go, I strongly recommend it.

The amount of tech in this building is just staggering. As the article hints
at, everyone who is everyone in finance has a spot there. This has an effect
of the more people who are colocated there, the bigger the draw it becomes for
the remaining few who aren't currently colocated there.

In the interconnected world of finance, data center cross connects become very
important. Its not unusual for a prop trading firm to have 30 different cross
connects to vendors, exchanges and sell side firms.

So I guess its not surprising that there have been companies formed with the
sole intention of connecting companies that already exist in teh data center.
Radianz and Lucera are mentioned in the article but there are usually a half a
dozen in each of the main data centers in the new york and chicago surrounding
area. as usual Nanex does a decent job of describing the reason why there are
so many data centers and they all are atleast 10 miles apart.

[http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3532.html](http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3532.html)

Another article from today that talks about the new data center.

[https://medium.com/@RobinWigg/wave-a-final-goodbye-to-
this-5...](https://medium.com/@RobinWigg/wave-a-final-goodbye-to-
this-5e8a03d2d653#.ou51wdi0m)

~~~
noir_lord
The Medium piece is interesting, still not sure where I stand on HFT, the
technology is endlessly fascinating I'm just not sure about the ends to which
it is put.

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sna1l
I visited a Equinix data center in San Jose and it was an incredible
experience. The redundancies and failsafes they have in place are mind
blowing. No two doors to the same room can be open at the same time. All doors
use handprint readers.

They have a rack of big batteries that fill up a huge room that go on
automatically in case of power failure. This will last about an hour until a
10000 HP generator on the roof starts and powers the data center for a week.

~~~
jorts
Typically the operators will have an agreement so that they can get the
generators refueled should the outage last even longer than what fuel they
have on premise, so they theoretically could run indefinitely on generator
power.

~~~
barkingcat
An outage requiring generator power for longer than 1 week might not allow
transportation of fuel. Just want to bring that up in case people really did
think you can run "indefinitely" on generator power if the roads, bridges, and
gas supply network is out, or if there's an emergency state of war or
terrorism.

At the 1wk+ territory, it will start to look something like Katrina, where the
roads were all blocked by flooding waters and fuel resupply missions required
the protection of the National Guard.

I mean you can charter helicopters to bring in fuel, but I think there are
more urgent things to power than a datacentre in those cases, for example,
hospitals and shelters for emergency humanitarian aid.

~~~
chinathrow
Never underestimate what people would do to keep the stock market running...

~~~
minimax
Or do! They closed the markets in the US for two days during Sandy even though
NY4 (and the other US equity exchange data centers) were fine.

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702047893045780871...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204789304578087131092892180)

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bogomipz
Equinix loves the flash interior decorating but it doesn't do anything for
your uptime or latency. Datacenters really aren't that interesting, maybe the
"meet me room" have some neat looking network gear but by and large DC are
visually monotonous. Question - aside from having a high concentration of wall
street firms colocated there what is interesting about this? What innovations
are they making?

The funny thing about all the security - the man traps, the palm reader, the
alarms systems there is still usually some security guard at the front desk
who is often napping. Not that I blame them but its kind of laughable.

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chinathrow
What is it with these new auto-play video distractions lately on
bloomberg.com? Does that really improve time spent on the site?

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jtchang
Equinix is really a top tier provider. I have some space down in San Jose SV5
and it's pretty awesome. If anyone is interested in a colo swap let me know. I
have a few units free and would love to barter it for some space maybe a bit
closer to SF.

Also just for kicks I requested a quote for the SV5 center a few months back.
They are roughly 3.2k / month for a full rack [1]:

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/ZPDm3gi.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZPDm3gi.png)

~~~
bogomipz
What makes them a "top tier provider"? They provide power and cooling and rack
real estate. They don't have a backbone. There's plenty of carrier neutral
facilities that provide the same for cheaper. They all provide similar SLAs
these days.

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atemerev
(The easiest way to cause worldwide financial panic is to bring a GPS spoofer
near NY4. Most of HFT operations synchronize time via GPS receivers).

~~~
minimax
Any GPS clock you are going to find in NY4 is going to be sufficiently
sophisticated to check the GPS signal against its internal oscillator in order
to check for validity. It can fall back to the internal oscillator if the GPS
time looks bad.

The other reason this is unlikely to be a problem is that network time
protocols break all the time (oops someone did a maintenance and broke sync
with the master clock). Lots of real world trading code has sanity checks on
the time.

~~~
atemerev
This is why I mentioned a spoofer, not jammer :)

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minimax
It's the same problem. Assume my GPS clock is synced to actual GPS. You turn
on your spoofer and now my clock sees that the GPS source is running faster or
slower than it should be so it falls back to the internal oscillator.

~~~
atemerev
What if I am careful not to mess up and introduce only microsecond/millisecond
level corrections? :)

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hbcondo714
What tremendous overhead Equinix is taking on with their facilities and
clientele. The Bloomberg author mentions their annual filing[1] which
discloses that they have a net income loss and 'substantial debt'.

[1] [https://www.last10k.com/sec-filings/eqix](https://www.last10k.com/sec-
filings/eqix)

~~~
nickpsecurity
The numbers I saw were positive. It was over $100mil in 2015 with projected
$10 in 2016. Revenues are huge. Im a bit tired so might have missed the
negatives but looked good at a glance.

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atemerev
Together with LD4 in London and TY3 in Tokyo, I think, more than 50% of worlds
trading activity goes through these 3 buildings.

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meesterdude
Wow, I remember this project! I was involved in the Electrical commissioning
for the first phase of the buildout. I Remember the 2 hour car rides at 5AM to
get there. One night I had to stay up overnight doing a UPS load-test there,
was cool walking around with nobody in sight, boring otherwise.

