The London Stock Exchange’s data centre migration project is proceeding apace, with Exa Infrastructure announcing it is providing low-latency connectivity to LSEG’s new Docklands location.
Exa will provide “on-network dark fibre, wavelength and Ethernet services” to the LSEG data centre, including co-located users, alongside a “handful” of other connectivity providers. The firm is also offering dedicated connections beyond the LSEG data centre to other sites, and to Exa’s own network to Europe and North America.
“There can be few cases in which the quality and speed of a network is more important than when connecting to the London Stock Exchange, so the decision to entrust Exa Infrastructure as connectivity provider to the new data centre is the highest possible endorsement of our capabilities,” said Andrew Haynes, EVP for product and technology at Exa, in a press release.
LSEG’s data centre move, which has been in the works since late 2020, will see the stock exchange firm move all its primary trading infrastructure from its current Liverpool Street site in the City of London. The new data centre sits within Telehouse’s Docklands site, which consist of five buildings near the river Lea, alongside a number of other data centre facilities.
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Work is well underway on the new LSEG data centre, with the group announcing the availability of the site’s new IP addresses to its clients in February 2022. According to the same announcement, LSEG expects to cut over to the new data centre on 27 August over the UK’s bank holiday weekend, with trading starting on Tuesday 30 August.
“The first environment to be available for customer testing in the new data centre will be the new London Stock Exchange Millennium trading and modularised GTP CDS, scheduled for early Q2 2022,” said LSEG in the February update.
One part of LSEG which won’t make the move to the new site is its acquisition Refinitiv, which is reportedly moving its data centre operations out of Docklands to a site near Slough.
LSEG’s data centre move is likely to be costly for many of the firms which have to co-locate with the stock exchange in order to ensure the lowest possible latency for their (or their clients’) trading data.
As the sites will not operate in parallel, and with equipment impossible to remove, relocate and reinstall over the course of one bank holiday weekend, co-location partners will face “significant capital expense” to duplicate their set-ups, according to one un-named executive quoted by Waters Technology.
