Equinix Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) said it will expand its International Business Exchange (IBX) London 4 (LD4) data center at its London Slough campus to support the increasing growth of its electronic trading ecosystem. The opening of the new $39 million expansion is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2018.
As the London Slough campus has more than 90 network service providers, access to a range of transatlantic cables, and delivers latency to New York in 30 ms and to Frankfurt in 4 ms, it is well-suited to be a high-performance hub for cloud and content service provision, and electronic trading, says Equinix. The LD4 data center expansion will enable customers to interconnect securely with leading capital markets participants, insurers and electronic payments firms, and over 1,000 other London businesses, along with more than 200 network service providers and 275 cloud and IT service providers. With 3,777 cabinets in nearly 10,000 square meters of colocation area today, the LD4 expansion will add 1,075 more cabinets in about 3,300 square meters of colocation area.
Composed of a portfolioof interconnected execution venues, trading platforms, market data vendors, service providers, buy-side firms, and sell-side firms, the electronic trading ecosystem is the world's largest, attests Equinix. Nasdaq and other financial services companies use Equinix's global interconnection platform, Platform Equinix for secure transactions with ecosystem participants. Nasdaq has deployed with Equinix in London’s LD4 and in York City for close proximity to customers and partners needing high performance, low latency connectivity to share large data amounts with various stakeholders through private business exchanges while avoiding the public internet.
"It is estimated that the financial and professional services industry contributes £176 billion to the UK economy annually," said Russell Poole, Equinix UK managing director. "In order for London to retain its title as the financial center of the world, despite concerns over Brexit, businesses require the latest IT infrastructure to thrive. The extension of our LD4 data center will help financial market participants continue to interconnect on a global scale — enabling them to improve the way investors access and act on the information that drives the global economy."
In June of 2016, the Brexit vote saw the United Kingdom leave the European Union, raising questions about Brexit's effect on the demand for and deployment of optical communications technology (see "Brexit: Many questions, few answers for optical communications"). Despite concerns, the Global Interconnection Index predicts that London’s private data exchange will grow from 114 Tbps to 486 Tbps by 2020.
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