SR Labs Relocates SuperFeed PoPs to Equinix's LD5 and NY2 Datacenters

SuperFeed is now available in Equinix's NY2 and LD5 facilities, and clients can either cross-connect directly to the SuperFeed ticker plants for the lowest latency, or connect via vendor partner such as TMX Atrium, BT Radianz, 7Ticks, Options and NYSE's SFTI network.

At the beginning of this year, SR Labs started a program to relocate SuperFeed─essentially a hosted Wombat ticker plant─and to decommission its use of the NYSE datacenters in favour of Equinix's NY2 facility in Secaucus and Equinix LD5 facility in Slough.

The vendor issued a request for proposal for network and hosting vendors in each location in the fourth quarter of 2014, enlisting managed service and IT infrastructure provider Options in the US, and Interactive Data's 7Ticks global managed services offering in Europe.

SR Labs had previously partnered with 7Ticks and Options as preferred infrastructure providers, but chose the two for this migration as they provided the "best performance, latency, value for money and customer service," says Ian McIntyre, chief operating officer for Europe at SR Labs. "It was crucial that this migration provided a performance improvement in addition to relocating us into Equinix, which was a key part of our selection process," he adds.

Many of SR Labs' clients are already co-located in NY2 and LD5, which will reduce the latency of SuperFeed since customers no longer have to connect over the extra distance to Mahwah and Basildon. In addition, SR Labs has deployed the latest version of its Data Fabric middleware for the Wombat software, which includes TCP offload and kernel bypass to improve messaging throughput and deterministic latency. The vendor has been working on the middleware since before the ICE acquisition, which is "the key to how we have reduced our hardware footprint in the new facilities by 68 percent," McIntyre says.

SR Labs has run its PoPs in parallel in Weehawken and Basildon, Secaucus and Slough over the past few months, but has now completely decommissioned its rack space in the NYSE datacenters.

"We structured a parallel running period to provide enough time for our customers to test the new environment and be comfortable with our plans. The initial migration had customers move without changing their connectivity model, and following that, customers have been considering their connectivity options─particularly those in Equinix, where cross-connecting gives the lowest latency path to our feed, and where they can save money compared to the leased line connectivity required previously," McIntyre adds.