BellSouth piping in financial data

You’d expect any financial company trading 100+ million shares on the Nasdaq in a single day to be on Wall Street. You’d assume incorrectly. In fact, one of the largest trading firms in the country is located in a suburb of Charleston, S.C. Automated Trading Desk has brought a little bit of Wall Street down south, handling 2% to 3% of the daily Nasdaq volume from a high-tech 22-acre campus located on 11 eWall Street, Mount Pleasant, S.C.

With countless billions of dollars trading hands in a virtual instant, ATD’s requirements for its data and voice networks are, to say the least, demanding. It has multiple back-up power feeds. Its main building is designed to withstand hurricane winds up to 135 miles an hour. And its data communications network--the heart and soul of its electronic trading network--has enough redundancy to make any other company look paranoid.

The heart of that telecom infrastructure is provided by BellSouth, which this week announced that it is proving data and voice service to the company. ATD’s trading bunker sits atop a fully redundant fiber ring, which in turn connects to redundant fiber metro rings. Not only does ATD keep trading when a fiber line is cut; it keeps trading if its central office blows up. BellSouth also provides voice-over-IP connectivity as well as multiple voice switches to ensure ATD’s voice network stays online.

ATD uses those links to plug directly into Nasdaq where it executes limit orders for its institutional clients, averaging 65 million shares per day and more than 100 million on peak trading days. ATD chief technology officer Jonathan Butler estimated that the firm receives 150 million individual pieces of data each day, and its traders process up to 28 Gigabytes of information in a shift. That data is fed into two independent and separately powered LANs, which in turn separately feed information into the PCs of its staff. Even if an entire network went down, an exact duplicate would remain running in its place.

Despite all of that data, Butler said ATD barely uses 15% of its overall capacity in a single day, giving itself a high ceiling for the highest peaks in market activity and preventing even the barest encroachment of latency.

“NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange would run out of capacity before we would,” Butler said. “We designed a system that could handle 45 million shares in a day, but we put in a system that can handle 10 times that volume.”

BellSouth officials said more and more financial companies are finding their way off of Wall Street and into its territory. In BellSouth’s region, markets such as Charlotte, N.C. and Atlanta have become big finance centers. BellSouth has not only built out its SmartRing architecture and its major metro markets, but it has applied its new multi-protocol label switching network technology to specific needs of financial institution. Using special customer premise equipment outgoing trade execution orders and confirmations are given priority status as well as special alerts or any other data a particular institution deems critical its business. Customers essentially can optimize their networks for individual types of data, far beyond the three data classes standard on an MPLS network, said Jack McMahon, BellSouth vice president and general manager of BellSouth’s northern operating region.

“It’s important for our customers to understand we’re providing them with the securest most reliable network they can get,” McMahon said.