NYSE Euronext and Ciena have announced plans for the first commercial deployment of 100G transport to connect data centers in the New York and London metro areas. While the deployment will use gear prior to general availability, this matters little to NYSE Euronext, which wants to beat its competition by using the technology sooner rather then later.
Low latency is the single most important factor driving MAN/WAN architectures in the equities trading industry. The company that completes a transaction quickest is the one that wins the deal. Because microseconds matter, a lower latency network creates a distinct competitive advantage and positively impacts revenues. Data volumes continue to increase, and trading groups such as NYSE Euronext transport terabytes of information and generate billions of transactions daily. Even small increases in latency could result in large revenue drops. Since latency matters so much, it is not possible to compress data to make transport more efficient, thus increasing bandwidth capacity requirements.
NYSE Technologies plans to deploy 100G wavelengths between data-center locations in New York/New Jersey and in London UK over Ciena\'s CN 4200 RS platform. The pre-commercial implementation will support 10/10GbE channels over a 100G wavelength.
Although it did not run a formal RFP, NYSE Technologies worked with four vendors, evaluating their 100G capabilities, and ultimately settled on Ciena. Understanding that the technology was not yet commercialized, NYSE Euronext thought it was a positive trade-off given the reduction in latency and the additional capacity that could be provided. The company feels the technology will give it an edge over its competition and noted that since it controls both ends it would not be an issue and it could swap out equipment as needed.
100G continues to pick up steam, and although standards will not be complete until 2009 and 2010 we expect to see more early deployment announcements over the next year, especially for low-latency and research and education applications.
Ciena has been working on 100G for over two years and is actively participating in the IEEE and ITU-T standards bodies, as well as the Optical Internetworking Forum. The company first showed off its 100G solution in November at Supercomputing 2008 (SC08) in a demonstration with CalTech and others, and follows that up with the NYSE Euronext deployment announcement. Nortel is also pretty far along with its 100G development and is expecting its 10/100 product to be available by year-end 2009; however, the company is battling longevity/financial issues.
Ciena\'s technology is pre-standard, it\'s big and clunky (the 100G "