How it all works: the node of financial trading from the inside

Translator's note: Equinix is ​​a major data center operator. In total, it controls 101 data centers in 32 major cities in 15 countries - today we will talk about the New York hub, which many US brokerage companies, hedge funds and investment banks use to host their servers.

With this material we open a series of posts about the “iron” infrastructure of financial organizations. In one of the following topics we will focus on the ITinvest data center , which houses the equipment of Russian traders.
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Of all the production sites on Equinix Platform, NY4 data center in Secaucus, New Jersey, is the busiest. More than 450 clients do business in a building of more than 100,000 square meters, providing infrastructure for the largest exchanges. These exchanges serve as a kind of magnet attracting a whole “ecosystem” of brokerage houses, investment banks, hedge funds and companies specializing in high-frequency trading [ eng. high-frequency trading, HFT ].

The building was built in 2000 as a factory for the production of glasses, which was subsequently closed. Equinix - a provider who has already provided collocation services in the data center NY2, located on the same street - acquired this building in 2006 and began the first phase of construction of NY4 in November 2007. The construction of the data center was divided into three phases, on each of which an auxiliary infrastructure was created with rooms of 29,000 square meters. The fiber ring connects NY4 to another Equinix building in Secaucus - NY2 and NY5.

Today we will take you inside this huge building and take a closer look at its infrastructure.

In the lair of online trading

On both sides of the long main corridor of the Equinix NY4 data center in Secaucus there are lattices; These grids and racks are connected by a cable that runs along the yellow suspension cable channels.



The ceiling height of 12 meters provides a large space for several levels of cable channels, filling the upper part of the data center Equinix, in which there are separate channels for connecting, carrier and power cables.



Instead of a raised floor, Equinix uses slab overlap, and cooling takes place through an overhead duct system. An extensive ventilation system is capable of absorbing up to 21 thousand cubic meters of air per minute, which then passes through suspended ducts into these vertical diffusers, through which cold air descends into the data center hall from a height of about 3.6 meters.



Each Equinix data center has at least five levels of access protection, including a combination of magnetic cards, a corridor with automatically closing doors, biometric systems (for example, a hand geometry reader shown above) and security systems on racks and racks.



An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) room in the Equinix NY4 data center, powered by a 26 megavolt-ampere substation. The equipment consists of an uninterruptible power supply system with a capacity of 30 megawatts supporting the operation of the computing unit in the event of a power supply system failure.



In the event of a power outage, the NY4’s data center equipment is equipped with these 18 Caterpillar diesel diesel generators with a capacity of 2.5 megawatts each, which together provide 46 megawatts of emergency power, enough to provide full equipment energy, and refrigeration systems and UPS . During Hurricane Sandy, these generators kept the equipment running for a whole week.



The cooling system in NY4 is equipped with huge pipes, through which chilled water flows to the equipment, as well as to the plate heat exchanger (right), which acts as a refrigerator in the winter and allows you to save energy that would normally be spent on refrigeration plants.



Top view of the refrigeration chamber of the Equinix NY4 data center in Secaucus



Equinix's external production base in New York has six tanks with a capacity of 113,000 liters each, designed to store diesel fuel for emergency power generators and provide 681,000 liters of fuel to maintain equipment in working condition during a power outage. During Hurricane Sandy, the tanks were refilled daily, and several diesel cars were sent directly to Maine and North Carolina.



Two huge tanks on the production base ensure the operation of refrigeration systems. White Tower is a reservoir of 1.8 million liters, which stores water. To her left is a reservoir of 530,000 liters, which accumulates heat energy. It is filled with chilled water maintained at a temperature of 8 degrees Celsius. When refrigeration units are shut off, chilled water can be used to maintain a low temperature.

Who needs such infrastructure

In our blog, we have repeatedly talked about the online trading boom in the US and Europe, as well as related technologies that are designed to enable traders to perform operations a fraction of a second faster than their competitors.

Below is a list of our materials about such financial companies and the technologies used by them:

• The series of articles “ Furious bulls: how Wall Street became dependent on“ high-speed ”trades ”: [ first part ], [ second part ], [ third part ], [ fourth part ], [ fifth part ].
• The series of materials “ Nanex: a nightmare on Elm Street for high-speed trading ”: [ first part ], [ second part ], [ third part ], [ fourth part ].
• The topic about the technology of direct access to the exchange - just its users often use the collocation of their equipment in the data centers of brokers or the exchange.
• The cycle of materials on the use of microwave radiation for online trading " High-frequency trading in the neighborhood ": [ first part ], [ second part ], [ third part ], [ fourth part ], [ fifth part (beginning) ], [ fifth part ( final) ].

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