London Stock Exchange opens up datacentre
The London Stock Exchange Group opened its market-linked datacentre to non-trading market participants on Monday for the first time.
Providers of financial-market information, such as Thomson Reuters, can now co-locate equipment within the London Stock Exchange Group's (LSEG) low-latency market-linked datacentre. The LSEG has offered hosting services since 2009, but until yesterday these were restricted purely to market participants, such as high-frequency trading firms.
"Now the vendors are able to take their own cabinets and provide their own services to all trading participants within the hosting centre and to people who aren't hosted in the centre, so they will obviously have a latency advantage," a spokesman for the LSEG told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.
Previously, a provider of market information could enter the LSEG datacentre only if invited by a trading firm, and then they would have to sit inside that firm's cabinet, the spokesman said. Monday's announcement means that market information and managed-hosting providers will be able to have their own cabinets, connect to multiple trading firms within the datacentre and offer managed services to trading participants.
To accommodate the expansion in service, the LSEG has created extra capacity within the hosting part of its datacentre and has plans to expand again in the future. In tandem with the expansion, the LSEG is going to upgrade the datacentre's IT infrastructure to boost the overall size and available bandwidth of its networking equipment. This should allow it to decrease latency and accommodate more services, according to the stock-exchange company.
The move by LSEG to expand its co-location business places it in heightened competition with finance-focused datacentre providers such as Interxion. It will be going after the same customer base of high-frequency traders, financial firms and providers of market information, who base their business models around low latency to the markets in which they function.