About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Precise Time – A Data Centre Utility

Subscribe to our newsletter

Endace suggests the Commission should require any of these venues that offer co-location services to make GPS timing signals available to users of the venues at a “reasonable cost”.

This has already been advocated in an article I wrote for Equinix’s Winter 2010/2011 Newsletter. If you missed it first time around, here’s a ‘reprint’:

We’ve all heard about the “cost of a microsecond” and the “latency arms race”. The relentless increase in price and transaction data rates in electronic trading, and the drive to remain competitive, are forcing financial markets participants to invest in the latest technology to support spiralling bandwidth requirements and to drive down data flow latency. This has in turn given birth to a whole new industry in latency monitoring solutions, based on the premise that in order to manage something, you have to be able to measure it.

This evolution has now played out to the point where traditional measurement techniques are no longer sufficiently accurate. The latency of hardware and software components used in trading systems is typically quoted in microseconds. Measurement solutions must therefore have resolution and accuracy in the sub-microsecond realm. At TS-Associates we call this field Precision Instrumentation.

The foundation of Precision Instrumentation is precise time keeping. This means having access to an accurate reference clock and a means of distributing time synchronisation. The traditional network-based time synchronisation protocol NTP is no longer suitable. Better solutions such as PTP or various analogue signalling techniques are able to provide the necessary accuracy.

The universal reference clock in common use is GPS time. Each GPS satellite has an onboard atomic clock that provides a stable and precise time reference. However, access to GPS time requires that a GPS antenna be positioned with line of sight to GPS satellites – usually on the roof of a data centre facility. In any multi-tenant facility that permits cable routes to the roof, you will find many GPS antennae, one or more for each tenant. This approach is obviously neither scalable nor cost effective, and indeed problematic for some buildings.

Data centres are in the business of providing the essential utilities – space, power, cooling and connectivity. We propose that the next service to drop into the essential utility layer will be access to a precise time reference.

Henry Young is CEO of TS-Associates.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: High-Performance Networks & Low-Latency Connectivity for Trading

With financial markets becoming more complex and interconnected in today’s electronic trading environment, trading firms, exchanges, and infrastructure providers need to continually push the boundaries of network performance to stay ahead. Ultra-low latency, seamless connectivity, and resilient infrastructure are no longer just advantages – to stay competitive, they’re necessities. This webinar, part of the A-Team...

BLOG

Exegy Unveils Nexus Market Data Platform to Tackle Latency, Scale and Cost Trade-Offs

Exegy has launched Nexus, a new market data platform designed to streamline infrastructure for high-volume, low-latency trading environments. The FPGA-based system replaces traditional, server-heavy feed handlers with a combination of managed appliances and network interface cards that deliver microsecond-level performance and reduce datacentre footprint by over 40%. “Across the buy side and sell side, market...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 15th year the Data Management Summit NYC brings together the North American data management community to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...