The technology will be deployed in NYX's Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI) infrastructure, which is used to connect NYX data centres with local access points within the New York and London metropolitan areas.
Specifically, Ciena is supplying a 100 Gbit/s card for its CN 4200 platform, which is based on the technology that the company demonstrated last year (see Ciena demos 'true' 100G transmission). The card is a muxponder, aggregating 10 Gbit/s streams of data from switches or routers and sending it out over the network as a single wavelength.
NYX says it is adopting 100 Gbit/s technology for a couple of reasons, namely because it requires "lower latency and much higher capacity in order to get the most bandwidth out of our fibre."
Many factors went into the decision process, both business and technical, according to a spokesperson, who added that "Ciena has a lower latency product that is more easily integrated into our overall management framework".
Latency is a big deal for the financial services operator, whose customers rely on real-time delivery of market data when executing stock trades.
NYX says it has plans to deploy eight 100 Gbit/s wavelengths initially, with the first being turned up in the SFTI network in the June time frame, followed by production in the new data centres starting in September.
"The network for the new data centres needs to be installed and running well before our computers and colocation customers move in starting the first quarter of 2010," explained the spokesperson.
Ciena presumably beat other 100 Gbit/s contenders to the deal, including Ericsson and Nortel, which have both performed 100 Gbit/s field trials with telecoms operators recently (see Ericsson trials 100G with Deutsche Telekom and Banverket ICT and Nortel trial 40G/100G).
"Ciena's technology is pre-standard, it's big and clunky (the 100G 'muxceiver' card takes up five slots), it uses a fair amount of power and it won't win any beauty contests; nevertheless, it meets NYSE Technologies' requirements," wrote Ovum analyst Ron Kline in a research note.
In its current form, Ciena's 100 Gbit/s solution uses dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) as the modulation scheme, without coherent detection. The vendor previously said that it would like to add the coherent piece of the puzzle in order to boost the reach of the system beyond 500 km. However, in this first application in metro area networks, the extra reach isn't needed.
The card currently supports 10 bE client-side interfaces only. Ciena has plans to add OC-192/STM-64, and OTU-2, as well as a OTU-4 (serial 100G) card in its phase-three development, which will take a couple more years, appearing in late 2011 or early 2012.