NY4: Inside Equinix’s Crown Jewel in New Jersey

NY4, Equinix’s nearly 340,000-square foot data center just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, is “where Wall Street actually transacts,” write Matthew Leising and Annie Massa of Bloomberg Markets in their recently published profile of the facility.

Hosting infrastructure for 49 exchanges, the Secaucus, New Jersey, site is one of the global financial industry’s most important locations few people have ever heard of. It’s where more than 6,300 companies interconnect, creating a hive of a trading ecosystem whose density any competitor would be hard-pressed to match.

The piece is both a profile of Equinix and its facilities and a beginner’s introduction to the backend of the electronic trading market as we currently know it.

For more details on the facility, here's a profile of NY4 Data Center Knowledge ran in 2014. Also, check out our photo tour of the NY4 facility.

One of the customers at NY4 is Lucera, which is a modern version of Radianz, a company that in 2000s pioneered the idea that participants in the trading ecosystem will gladly outsource the complicated and expensive task of setting up and managing interconnection.

Radianz, which British Telecom acquired in 2005 for $130 million, gave banks like Goldman Sachs a way out of the telecom infrastructure business. It offered them access to all major financial institutions through a single connection, Leising and Massa write, replacing the need to lay their own cable and set up their networks, which they had been doing since the 1980s.

Read more: The Data Centers Powering High Frequency Trading

Fast forward to today, and providing infrastructure services to the trading market is its own industry, where even the exchange operators themselves found new big revenue opportunities. NY4 and other data centers operated by Equinix and some of its competitors are where this industry’s physical manifestation can be seen.

Read Bloomberg’s profile on NY4 here.