Thomson Reuters has built out its Elektron data feed infrastructure with a third data centre in Chicago to support the Elektron Real Time low latency consolidated data feed – it has already deployed it in London and New York. The company has also added delivery of direct feeds from Canadian exchange venues to its Elektron hosting data centres in Chicago and New York, and there is more to come as it extends its hosting data centre network and matches its locations with data centres dedicated to the Elektron Real Time data feed.
The addition of an Elektron Real Time data centre in Chicago will provide local market participants with full tick data from venues around the world and local data in less than 10 milliseconds, or as Peter Moss, managing director, trading at Thomson Reuters, puts it: “Elektron Real Time will super-charge the delivery and breadth and depth of content we can deliver to local participants.”
Moss continues: “Elektron Real Time is a large program of work across the feeds business to provide a next generation real-time feed. The feed is of interest because it offers low-latency, a richer set of data and a data model that is easier to use. It will provide a set of services at much lower latency than Reuters Data Feed (RDF) and we will continue to build out around the world and migrate customers from RDF to Elektron Real Time. The Elektron service will eventually replace RDF, but migration will be a multi-year activity. It is compatible with RDF so old apps will still work and new apps will gain the benefits of Elektron’s richer data and improved data model.”
While Elektron Real Time will replicate all the data access available in RDF, richer content will include elements such as full order book data – RDF provides summarised order books – while the data model will support additional analytic capabilities in the feed and more complex data structures allowing richer reference data to be carried.
The Elektron Real Time data feed in Chicago adds to similar services in London and New York, and customers are beta testing Elektron Real Time out of a data centre in Asia that will move into production in the next couple of months. This Elektron Real Time centre is located in a city that already has a hosting centre, a dual data centre approach that is planned to go global.
Moss explains: “The market demand is there so we will match our hosting centres with Elektron Real Time data centres. Elektron Real Time centres collect data locally, turn it around and deliver rich and varied content at the best latency to local markets. They also deliver consolidated date feeds into other international markets as required. Hosting and Elektron Real Time data centres will often be in the same location to deliver fast access to real-time content.”
The company is underpinning each Elektron Real Time data centre with newly developed software designed to deliver low latency and its Enterprise platform, which it believes will scale to meet growing market data volumes. Moss comments: “We have invested to cover a 20-year period. Elektron Real Time will handle data much faster than RDF and has been built to handle doubling data rates on a continuous annual basis.”
The delivery of data from Canadian exchange venues using a low-latency connection to the Chicago and New York hosting centres will extend the liquidity pool for Thomson Reuters’ US customers and is expected to appeal particularly to the concentration of derivatives traders in Chicago as well as to hedge funds. The service started this week with the company saying it is a response to recognised need in the market and that it has a pipeline of interested customers.
The addition of Canadian data at the Chicago and New York centres follows Thomson Reuters’ provision in June of proximity capacity for customers to put applications in the same London data centre as its foreign exchange matching engine.
As the company continues to deploy more services to the hosting centres, it is also planning the addition of a further hosting centre in Asia in the fourth quarter. This will add to the New York, Chicago and London data centres, as well as centres in Toronto, Sao Paulo, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Stockholm.
Subscribe to our newsletter