We've noted that data centers in many ways are the future of Wall
Street firms. You cannot be successful without state-of-the-art data
center services, which have been sprouting fast. Just look at Citigroup's much-publicized green data center efforts, PNC's big green wall, and HSBC's data center just outside Chicago.
But perhaps the most impressive effort, for sheer ambition, is the
NYSE's planned data center in Mahwah, New Jersey, which in some ways
has become the epicenter of modern data centers.
The NYSE Euronext facility will total 400,000 square feet,
about 170,000 square feet of which will be dedicated to data center
operations. That's massive. Only 20 percent of that space will be used
for NYSE Euronext operations. The rest will be leased out. Demand seems
to be fairly strong. Already, the company has pre-leased 20,000 square
feet of the available capacity. That's likely to go higher soon.
The days of leasing data center space are over. In some ways, the
exchange company is betting its future on data centers, where billions
of dollar worth of transactions will flow every day. There's a lot of
next-generation technology going into the new center, such as 10g ethernet, a low-latency core developed with Juniper Networks and Infiniband technology with Voltaire.
But when you get down to core issues, this amounts to a power game.
"Our real business is power consumption and capacity of compute," one executive was quoted in Data Center Knowledge.
"That is our bread and butter. We sell space in our data centers by the
kilowatt. We meter people's cabinets. The more (trading) they do in
those cabinets and the hotter they run, the more we earn. The cost of
power is getting down to where people are making trading decisions
based on it."
Green technologies thus become more than a nice nod to the
environment. They become a competitive necessity, one that has obvious
marketing benefits. The NYSE has been hosting a "green grid" forum about data center efficiency. At some point, we'll likely hear more about this.
By: Jim Kim for 
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