Take a Tour of Savvis' Newest NY Metro Data Center

New York City often is said to be the financial capital of the world -- though London and Hong Kong surely would take offense. Still, trillions of dollars of investments flow through the exchanges that call New York home.

The order flow for NYSE Euronext, Nasdaq, the BATS Exchange and most other New York-based exchanges, dark pools and broker-dealer crossing networks, however, now finds its way through data centers located in nearby New Jersey. The exact volume, percentage of the overall market or even the dollar amount of trades that route through the New Jersey-based liquidity hubs is hard to gauge, but judging by the size of the area's liquidity centers and the plans for expansion, it is fair to say that the slice of overall U.S. equities volume passing through third-party data centers is quite high. And options traffic in these facilities also is growing, with some of the major options exchanges, including CBOE, locating matching engines in New Jersey, as well.

Savvis, a provider of colocation and data center hosting to financial services companies, operates four New Jersey-based data centers -- comprising more than 300,000 square feet of space -- three of which are primarily dedicated to the needs of the provider's financial services customers. Savvis operates two data centers in Weehawken, N.J., that are dedicated mostly to proximity colocation to liquidity sources. The Weehawken location is roughly geographically centered between NYSE Euronext's data center in Mahwah, N.J.; Equinix's colocation facility in Secaucus, N.J.; and Nasdaq OMX's operation in Carteret, N.J. (which is operated by Verizon Business Services). Weehawken also is located just a few miles across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan.

The Savvis NJ2X facility in Weehawken is the company's newest New York-area facility, located across the street from the older NJ2 data center, which has a total of approximately 148,000 square feet of available space. The NJ2X facility has total raised-floor space of 83,000 square feet. Savvis says it operates the data center with a raised-floor power density of 175 watts per square foot.

But when it comes to data centers, numbers often do not tell the full story of the facility -- as with most things in life, a picture is worth a thousand words. On the following pages you will find a variety of exclusive photos from the NJ2X facility that highlight some of the technology and innovations that are found in a modern data center.