NYSE puts stock in 10G Ethernet

Force10 Networks has been selected by NYSE Euronext to supply a 10G Ethernet network to manage the exchange's data centers in New Jersey and London.

The network will comprise Force10 C-Series core switches and S-Series S50N access switches. NYSE Euronext said it will deploy hundreds of the switches.

The exchange did not disclose the value of the Force10 contract but said it was part of a $500 million data center upgrade. The switches will replace a mixed 100M/1G/10Gbps Ethernet management network in which endpoints were connected via 100Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet into a backbone utilizing 10G uplinks, says Andy Bach, senior vice president of network services for NYSE Euronext.

"We've stepped it up by an order of magnitude," Bach says.

NYSE Euronext's $500 million data center upgrade also includes 10G Ethernet switching and 100G optical transport gear from Juniper Networks and Ciena, respectively.

The Force10-based management network will be an "out-of-band" network operations and control infrastructure to manage the operations of the 10G and 100G networks. Management and surveillance traffic will run independently of the global trading and transaction traffic on the 10G and 100G infrastructures, Bach says.

The global trading network handles billions of transactions daily.

NOCs for the management network and data centers will be located in New Jersey and London.