Inside Equinix's NY4 data center where Wall Street trades

I&#x27;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&#x27;s tremendous scale.<p>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: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.enterprisetech.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;amazon-cant-catch-lucera-financial-cloud&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.enterprisetech.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;amazon-cant-catch-l...</a>

If you are at all into this sort of thing( data centers) and you ever get a chance to go, I strongly recommend it.<p>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&#x27;t currently colocated there.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nanex.net&#x2F;aqck2&#x2F;3532.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nanex.net&#x2F;aqck2&#x2F;3532.html</a><p>Another article from today that talks about the new data center.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@RobinWigg&#x2F;wave-a-final-goodbye-to-this-5e8a03d2d653#.ou51wdi0m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@RobinWigg&#x2F;wave-a-final-goodbye-to-this-5...</a>

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.<p>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.

Equinix loves the flash interior decorating but it doesn&#x27;t do anything for your uptime or latency. Datacenters really aren&#x27;t that interesting, maybe the &quot;meet me room&quot; 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?<p>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.

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

Equinix is really a top tier provider. I have some space down in San Jose SV5 and it&#x27;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.<p>Also just for kicks I requested a quote for the SV5 center a few months back. They are roughly 3.2k &#x2F; month for a full rack [1]:<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;ZPDm3gi.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;ZPDm3gi.png</a>

(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).

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 &#x27;substantial debt&#x27;.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.last10k.com&#x2F;sec-filings&#x2F;eqix" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.last10k.com&#x2F;sec-filings&#x2F;eqix</a>

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

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.