London Stock Exchange datacentre migration project secures low-latency network support from EXA

The London Stock Exchange Group’s (LSEG) datacentre migration is pushing ahead, with connectivity provider EXA Infrastructure confirming it has sealed a deal to hook up the new facility with low-latency connectivity.

The LSEG is in the process of migrating the data and workloads housed within its primary City of London datacentre to an alternative, newly-built datacentre campus overseen by colocation provider Telehouse on the Isle of Dogs. 

News of the migration emerged via fintech blog A-Team Insight in October 2020, with LSEG providing regular updates about how the project is progressing to its clients via the Service Announcement changes page on its website.

The most recent of these notifications confirms that clients are now able to access the new IP addresses for all of the customer development, legacy and production environments within its new datacentre complex, as of February 2022.

As well as housing the data underpinning the activities of the LSEG, the new facility will contain the trading and market data platforms for its partner organisation Turquoise Europe. It launched in 2020 to provide brokers with a single point of access into 17 different European countries.

Computer Weekly understands the migration process began during the third quarter of 2021, and is expected to be completed by August 2022, with LSE confirming in a briefing note to customers that its legacy site will no longer be operational from Tuesday 30 August 2022.

In a statement, EXA Infrastructure confirmed that it is one of a handful of network providers who have secured the accreditation needed to provide low and ultra-low network connectivity to the LSEG’s new datacentre.

“EXA Infrastructure will provide on-network dark fibre, wavelength and Ethernet services to LSEG for use by all the colocated users of the datacentre,” the company said, in a statement.

“EXA’s substantial terrestrial and sub-sea network across Europe and the North Atlantic is particularly suited to trading venue connectivity, with all major European and North American exchanges being on-network and diversely routed, and its Hibernia Express cable offering the lowest latency between London and New York at sub-59 milliseconds (mS) for a round trip.”

Andrew Haynes, executive vice-president of product and technology at Exa Infrastructure, said its selection as a network provider to the LSEG is a big feather in the cap for the firm and its technology.

“There can be few cases in which the quality and speed of a network is more important than when connecting to the London Stock Exchange, so the decision to entrust EXA Infrastructure as connectivity provider to the new datacentre is the highest possible endorsement of our capabilities,” he added.