Options signs on to Equinix’s newly extended London Data Centre

Leading provider of cloud-enabled managed services to the global financial services sector to deploy in Equinix LD4 data centre to accelerate business performance.

Tuesday, 27th November 2018 Posted 5 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Options, the leading provider of cloud-enabled managed services to the global financial services sector, will be deployed in Equinix’s expanded LD4 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centre. The £29 million expansion of the LD4 site at Equinix’s London Slough campus took place earlier this year. Options has committed to extending its relationship with Equinix in the UK with its deployment in LD4, which is planned to take place in January 2019. Options already has existing deployments with Equinix globally, including in New York, Singapore and Hong Kong.

With over 90 network service providers and access to a range of transatlantic cables, Equinix’s London Slough campus is one of the busiest network nodes in the UK, and offers latency in the region of 30 milliseconds to New York and 4 milliseconds to Frankfurt, making it an ideal high-performance hub for electronic trading, as well as cloud and content service provision.

With 200 data centres across its global footprint, Equinix’s partnership with Options has so far enabled its customers access to more than 1,600 network and 2,750 cloud and IT service providers. LD4’s newly expanded data centre facilities will further enable Options to increase its performance, reduce the time it takes to provision services, and improve its resiliency and reliability. This will have an increase Options’ business performance and increase the user experience of its customers.

Highlights / Key Facts

· Options was the first company to offer private cloud services to the financial sector, and now works with more than 250 financial services customers globally. The nature of its business makes the performance and reliability of cloud services fundamental to its commercial success. As Options is the only provider in the industry to exclusively offer fully managed infrastructure to the capital markets, it requires a data centre partner capable of supporting its private financial cloud and affording its clients the flexibility to scale across all key financial centers globally, as and when required.

· According to the recently published Global Interconnection Index (GXI) volume 2, by 2021, cloud and IT services across Europe are predicted to be the second largest industry by interconnection bandwidth, or the private exchange of data between companies off the public internet, with 314 Tbps. Driven by cloud service providers such as Options, London’s interconnection bandwidth alone is set to grow by a 52% compound annual growth rate.

· Platform Equinix™ enables Options’ customers access to more than 1,600 network and 2,750 cloud and IT service providers. By deploying in key financial markets and leveraging an interconnection-first strategy has given Options the ability to deploy its customers in major financial hubs in a fraction of the time it would have taken previously. By colocating with Equinix IBX data centres, Options has gained the flexibility to connect to many more carriers than if it had built its own facilities or chosen a carrier or intergrator rather than a carrier-neutral provider.

· The expansion of Equinix’s LD4 data centre earlier this year enables customers to interconnect securely with 1,000+ businesses in London including leading capital markets participants, insurers and electronic payments firms, as well as 200+ network service providers and 275+ cloud and IT service providers. Previously, LD4 had 3,777 cabinets in approximately 10,000 square meters of colocation area; the expansion has added an additional 1,075 cabinets in approximately 3,300 square meters of colocation area.