In The New Network, Every Second Counts

Network latency is fast becoming an issue in every industry. From offering immediate search results, to working seamlessly in remote offices, to providing 4G mobile services, network speed is critical. Customer satisfaction, employee productivity, the very ability to conduct business—all of these hinge upon the network quickly doing its job.

And nowhere is this need for speed more clear than in finance.

Case in point: NYSE Euronext. At the world's busiest stock exchange, which handles 30% of the world's cash equities trading traffic, microseconds matter. And, when NYSE Euronext recently set tough new latency goals for their global network, they took a fresh look at their data center architecture, and chose to switch to Juniper.

For NYSE Euronext to get a real speed advantage over world-class competition their data centers needed serious rethinking. The legacy data center architecture was too complex to scale effectively, and it lacked the openness needed to adapt quickly to changes. Six years ago, NYSE Euronext had built a Juniper WAN running Junos in North America. That was so successful, it was later duplicated in Europe, and that led to a realization—Juniper could deliver the speed and reliability they wanted in their data center.

Junos at NYSE Euronext

With Juniper, "The Big Board" chose more than just a hardware solution, they chose a new philosophy—Junos. NYSE Euronext partnered with Juniper engineers to support the communications for its next-generation data center. Juniper's approach collapsed the traditional three-tiered data center model down to two hops—radically simplifying the network and significantly boosting speed without compromising capacity or reliability. With Junos, a single network OS integrated across the entire data center, the new design is modular, open and ready to scale.

Running the network with one consistent and stable network operating system allowed NYSE Euronext to go with radically simplified two-tier network architecture with dramatically reduced network latency. It also streamlined operations by reducing ten global data centers to four, reducing total cost of ownership by up to 52% in capital cost, and up to 44% in power and cooling costs.

According to NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow, their new data center architecture is "an elastic and efficient infrastructure providing unmatched scale." By running Junos, NYSE Euronext shaved latency in its data centers from 150 to 50 microseconds—a huge gain in an industry where speed is critical to success.

The New Network is here, and NYSE Euronext runs it.