NYSE, DuPont Fabros Link Their NJ Data Centers

NYSE Technologies will build a high-speed fiber connection between its data center in Mahwah, New Jersey and the new DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) data center facility in Piscataway, the companies said today. The fiber link, which will be operational in early 2012, will make the DuPont Fabros NJ1 facility more attractive to financial trading companies, who will now have low-latency connections to the NYSE "matching engine" servers in Mahwah.

As part of the agreement, NYSE Technologies will build an SFTI Access Center at the Piscataway facility. SFTI - short for Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure- is a secure network operated by the NYSE that provides over 1,300 financial market participants with a single point of connectivity to multiple exchanges, market centers and content service providers.

High-Speed Link Between Piscataway, Mahwah

The new SFTI Access Center at Piscataway will interconnect NYSE Euronext’s Liquidity Center at Mahwah, proximity hosting site at Weehawken and network of SFTI Access Centers in New York and Chicago to offer more direct connections to markets and market information.

"This is a huge achievement for DFT," said Hossein Fateh, President and CEO of DuPont Fabros. "Connecting our NJ1 data center directly to the NYSE Technologies SFTI Network will meet our current and future tenants’ requirements for a direct low-latency connection to the trading platforms and matching engines. NYSE Technologies’ SFTI access center will allow NJ1 to offer even greater performance for latency sensitive trading platforms over data centers without a direct connection via this SFTI Access Center."

Another Lease Announced

DuPont Fabros also said today that it had leased an additional 570 kilowatts of critical load at NJ1, and now has leased 25 percent of the space available at the NJ1 data center, is a 360,000 square feet facility with 88,000 square feet of raised floor space currently available. The company's leasing at NJ1 has been under scrutiny amid conjecture that the New Jersey market is facing a possible surplus of wholesale data center space - with the DuPont Fabros facility representing the largest chunk of inventory. Several of DFT's rivals have recently reported active leasing activity.

But Fateh said there has been active interest from prospective tenants. "We think things are turning around for us in New Jersey," Fateh said. "We're feeling very optimistic. We now believe we have a wider market of enterprise customers, because more financial services firms will be interested in this data center."