Fear not, high-speed and options traders: Nasdaq is prepared in the events of a business disruption.
Theexchange operator is moving its Disaster Recovery site for the US equities and options markets from Ashburn, Virginia to a facilty run and operated by Equinox in Chicago, Illinois beginning in August 2015.
The move will be a phased approach, asccording to a press statement.
The new DR site will be located in the Nasdaq Point of Presence within the Equinix Chicago data center (CH4) located in 350 E. Cermak on the 8th floor. The recently launched Nasdaq POP in Chicago, along with the Nasdaq POP in Equinix’s Secaucus, New Jersey facility, allows customers to connect directly to any of the Nasdaq market systems from remote financial data centers.
“Migrating our disaster recovery facility to Chicago will be convenient, cost effective and more efficient for our market participants,” said Tom Wittman, head of global equities and executive vice president of global trading and market services at Nasdaq. “Chicago is home to many primary and disaster recovery engines. We will continue making the DR facility available to additional Nasdaq markets throughout 2015 and beyond.”
Equinix provides a neutral meeting place for trading venues, buy- and sell-side firms, market data providers, technology providers and financial networks. More than 850 financial services customers locate servers and infrastructure within Equinix data centers, according to company claims.
“As one of the largest carrier hotels in the country, 350 Cermak is the focal point for Chicago’s financial markets and is ideally located to provide connectivity to more than half a dozen exchanges plus hundreds of broker dealers, crossing and other network providers, market data distributors, liquidity providers, and application providers all located in the same building or nearby in downtown Chicago,” said Stewart Orrell, senior director of global market development for Equinex. “Equinix and Nasdaq have a long-standing relationship and we are excited Nasdaq continues to leverage our global data center platform to meet their changing business needs.”
Nasdaq’s eSpeed platform was its first market to launch its DR facilities in Chicago in the fourth quarter of 2014. The Nasdaq Futures platform will go live with Chicago as its primary DR site when the platform launches later this year.
