With millions at stake, the financial sector is setting the bar high for data services. Computerised financial trading means millions of pounds depend on data services being low-latency, high-security and lightning-fast. We talk to David Green to find out how Virgin Media Business is meeting the challenge.
Financial services is at the leading edge when it comes to dealing with data. It has to be. Whole economies rest on the integrity and security of financial data, and millions ride on transactions conducted in milliseconds.
Fast, guaranteed delivery of data transfer is the lifeblood of the business, so financial services players need high-speed, high-capacity network services. It’s one of the first things a firm considers when planning new sites or linking existing ones, says David Green, Senior Product Manager for high capacity services at Virgin Media Business.
“When we see businesses that are planning a new site, they show us three or four locations and ask, ‘Which of these can you get to?’ With our national network we’re one of the first carriers they think of coming to. We can reach 85% of the UK’s businesses and get fibre optic cable to their door.”
So, what exactly is pushing the need for high-capacity, low-latency network connections between sites?
Algorithmic trading
Financial market transactions are often carried out automatically based on preset algorithms. “Latency costs money – potentially millions of pounds ride upon milliseconds of delay – so network connections between servers, storage and the organisation’s various sites must be as close to real time as possible,” says David.
Seamless disaster recovery
Financial sector organisations need rock-solid provision for business continuity and disaster recovery. Not only is it good business sense, it’s also required by industry regulations like Basel II and MIFID, which demand a minimum distance between primary and secondary data centres.
Robust disaster recovery provision needs high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections that allow both data centres to be totally synchronised. Servers and storage at the second site need to mirror the production environment exactly, so they can take over immediately if disaster strikes. That means communications networks need to operate in near-real time.
Moving outside the M25
More and more financial services businesses are moving their secondary data centres from central London to outside the M25, in Kent, Essex and Wiltshire, looking for more space and lower rents.
But before making the move, companies want to know whether they can get the performance to support processing and storage right to their door. This means high-capacity networks. They also want to know how much resiliency a carrier can offer, whether the carrier owns its own fibre, the services it can run and what kind of latency they’ll experience.
Network resiliency
“When we go to work with a customer in the financial services industry, they want to know we own our own end-to-end physical network. The answer is – we do!” says David.
Virgin Media Business has 186,000km of our own fibre optic cables in the ground. Our managed high capacity services use DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) to allow data traffic via multiple protocols over the same network connection, with capacities equivalent to 40x10 Gbps channels on one installation.
predicted to increase by 33 times over the next decade (Source: UMTS Forum: “Mobile traffic forecasts 2010-2020”) And as more and more data services come on stream, mobile network operators are going to need a network that can handle larger and larger amounts of traffic.
Big money, big bandwidth
All these requirements – low latency, network resiliency, business continuity and wide geographical reach – are met by Virgin Media Business high capacity services. With the UK’s largest all-fibre network and the option of national or dedicated service, we’re the provider of choice for an increasing number of financial services clients.
To find out how high capacity services from Virgin Media Business can help your business, contact your Virgin Media Business account manager.
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Our high-capacity network services come in two main flavours:
Dedicated HCS
Our dedicated HCS is designed for sites up to 100 km apart, but is typically used for much shorter distances, with different protocols running via dedicated channels to link server and storage traffic between offices and data centres. Synchronous replication can be used for distances up to 70km apart, while asynchronous must be used beyond that.
Physical equipment at each of the client sites, along with DWDM high capacity fibre optic cable between them, can provide an impressive 99.999% availability, supporting all major Ethernet, Fibre Channel and mainframe protocols with a maximum latency of 3 milliseconds.
A wide range of Fibre Channel bandwidths are supported, including 1, 2, 4, 8 and 10 Gbps, while Ethernet is supported at 1 and 10 Gbps (and multiples thereof). The mainframe protocol FICON is supported at 1, 2 and 4 Gbps as is ESCON at 200 Mbps.
National HCS
National HCS is designed for longer distance connections between sites, for example, connecting offices and data centres in geographically remote locations. National HCS also uses DWDM and provides Fibre Channel links at 1, 2 and 4 Gbps, Ethernet at 10 Gbps and FICON at 1, 2 and 4 Gbps.
Latency is less than 5 milliseconds, and availability is up to 99.99%. The service uses repeaters that allow protocols normally limited by distance, like Fibre Channel, to travel hundreds of kilometres – a service unique to Virgin Media. The network’s low hop count gives it an extremely low latency for long distance, which translates into better performance for end users.
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