What is Dim Fiber?
Optical fiber only partially lit in a fiber optic transmission system (FOTS) employing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).WDM technology can support a considerable number of wavelengths running simultaneously over a single optical fiber within a cable comprising perhaps a great number of fibers. A dim fiber is one over which not all available wavelengths have been lit and which, therefore, has excess capacity.

Why Dim Fiber?

A dim Fiber customer gets assigned a wavelength in a fiber span that provides flexibility and performance similar to dark fiber with the following benefits:

• Use of fiber span not limited to a specific bandwidth, just a specific wavelength, thus the customer has more control.
• Reduced equipment on the circuit reducing potential outages.
• Reduced equipment on the circuit reducing processing latency.
• Dark Fiber performance at a lower cost.
• Dark Fiber performance with a variety of contract terms closer to customer experience with lit services.

Why CFN Services Dim Fiber Solutions?

• With CFN Services as your partner on your dim fiber plans – CFN will manage and monitor the health of the fiber span via other circuits running on the same fiber span.
• Dim Fiber allows wireless operators to take advantage of the owners economics and cost efficiencies of a managed backhaul solution, which provides lowest per unit cost as the backhaul traffic increases
• CFN takes away the hassle and worry of managing an Outside Plant Network such as relocations, construction, outages, etc. by managing the full solution so as a customer you get only the benefit of dim without the down side.
• For longer spans, CFN can provide mid-span regeneration reducing equipment, new collocations and operational cost and complexity for the customer.

Contact CFN Services to see if Dim Fiber is the solution for you: Contact CFN Now

Denver, CO – August 10, 2010 – National data center and peering provider CoreSite announces today that two

of the top economic news service providers have deployed at the company’s Washington, DC data center at 1275 K Street. The DC data center and colocation facility is located approximately one mile from the United States Department of Labor, Departme

nt of Commerce and Department of The Treasury. Need to Know News and Rapidata deliver low latency economic news to high-frequency trading firms, investment banks, and other entities with a vested interest in receiving market data as quickly as possible. With critical, market-moving data being released directly from the U.S. Departments of Labor, Commerce and Treasury, these companies identified CoreSite as the best data center in the closest proximity. Read More

The federal government has begun what looms as the largest data center consolidation in history, hoping to dramatically reduce IT operations that are currently distributed among more than 1,100 data centers.

On Friday Federal CIO Vivek Kundra outlined details of the ambitious plan in a memo that directs federal agencies to prepare an inventory of the IT assets by April 30 and develop a preliminary data center consolidation plan by June 30. These plans will need to be finalized by Dec. 31, 2010, with implementation beginning in 2011.

Huge Implications for Data Center Sector
The government data center consolidation has huge implications for the fortunes of system integrators, data center service providers (especially in northern Virginia), and cloud computing platforms optimized for hosting government apps.

The consolidation effort figures to generate significant business for companies providing energy efficiency tools and consulting, as Kundra signaled that reducing energy costs will be a driving force in the effort. He noted that the number of government data centers soared from 432 in 1999 to the current 1,100 plus.

“This growth in redundant infrastructure investments is costly, inefficient and unsustainable and has a significant impact on energy consumption,” said Kundra. “In 2006 Federal servers and data centers consumed 6 billion kwH of electricity, and without a fundamental shift in how we deploy technology it could reach 12 billion kwH by 2012.”

First Assessment Due April 30
The immediate challenge: Federal agencies must conduct a “high-level assessment” of all their IT assessments and data centers by April 30, followed by a more detailed accounting by July 30.

In announcing the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, Kundra outlined four high-level goals:

* Promote the use of Green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers;
* Reduce the cost of data center hardware, software and operations;
* Increase the overall IT security posture of the government;
* Shift IT investments to more efficient computing platforms and technologies.

That last bullet point is boosting expectations that a meaningful chunk of government IT operations will be shifted to a cloud computing model. Kundra discussed this prospect at an appearance Friday, saying the federal government is looking for “game-changing approaches” to deal with the problematic growth in data centers rather than “brute force consolidation.”

“This is a huge opportunity to apply best practices from the private sector,” Kundra told Federal Computer Week. “It is a huge problem. The path we are on does not make sense.”

Likely to Boost Data Center Demand
But the cloud model won’t make sense for all federal applications. If recent consolidations by companies like HP and Intel are any indication, the drive for greater efficiency will render many of the current data center properties obsolete. Many older data facilities do not have the power capacity to support a highly-utilized equipment space. Consolidation also leads to higher densities, which are more difficult to cool in legacy facilities.

That means new data center space, most likely in northern Virginia and Maryland. Systems integrators and companies building cloud platforms have been among the players driving demand for data center space in northern Virginia, where demand has been strong and new supply has been limited. As the federal consolidation moves ahead, that demand is likely to increase as federal agencies identify new requirements.

The federal consolidation is also likely to be good news for server vendors, as consolidations usually include hardware refreshes to take advantage of the latest advances in computing power and energy efficiency.

THE CURRENT ENVIRONMENT
When financial services and other firms around the world rely on your global infrastructure to transact business, you need to ensure low latency and highest reliability possible. That’s one of the key reasons CFN Services chose Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers for colocation. The provider of network services wanted a partner that enabled it to continue delivering premium services.
THE SOLUTION
CFN evaluated a variety of data center providers, ultimately choosing Equinix. “It’s important that we partner with one of the largest colocation providers to get closer to our growing base of electronic trading customers. Moreover, Equinix’s quality of service, reliability, and professionalism are renowned,” explains Wil Tirado, vice president of Engineering for CFN.
Equinix’s focus on specific vertical markets was also key because it aligns with CFN’s
go-to-market approach. “Equinix’s knowledge of the needs of different industries allows
us to leverage relevant product offerings in those spaces,” continues Tirado.
WHY EQUINIX
Maintaining carrier neutrality
CFN develops customized network solutions that optimize connections to multiple exchanges and trading venues. To ensure optimized connections along with diversity offerings, CFN’s Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure spans multiple providers. As a carrier-neutral network integrator, CFN sought a partner with the same approach.
“A network neutral and carrier rich data center enables us to be responsive to
our customers’ requirements. Equinix allows us to ensure we continue providing our customers with the most optimized network solutions,” says Tirado.
CFN serves customers in the enterprise, public sector, and carrier markets, including financial traders that require very high network performance. The electronic trading community requires high speed connectivity to reduce risk and stay competitive. These financial customers gain significant benefits from CFN’s commitment to continually optimize its network as part of its Low Latency Improvement Plan. In addition to using FiberSource®, its proprietary nationwide infrastructure knowledge and relationship base of nearly 250,000 route miles of fiber and 550 metro networks, CFN leverages all means necessary to decrease latency and insure diversity on its routes.

“It’s unique to find a great combination of network availability from multiple carriers colocated with a dense community of financial market participants. Equinix is a key component of our ever-growing global low-latency infrastructure.”
Wil Tirado, Vice President of Engineering, CFN Services. Download Full Case Study

Ultra-Low Latency Connectivity and Proximity Collocation offering for local and international financial institutions and vendors looking to participate in the United States equities, futures and options marketplaces

CFN Services has announced their continued commitment to provide lowest latency connections to all Global Exchanges, expanding and improving latencies to 6 new locations in between New York, New Jersey and Chicago.  CFN Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure currently supports over 25 data centers spread out across 7 countries.

The newest locations announced are:

NJ/NY Metro

• 5851 Westside Ave., North Bergen, NJ
• 755 Secaucus Rd., Secaucus, NJ
• 120 W. Passaic, Rochelle Park, NJ

Chicago Metro

• 400 S. LaSalle, Chicago, IL
• 440 S. LaSalle, Chicago, IL
• 10 S. Canal St. Chicago, IL

CFN Services Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure is designed to facilitate trading and information exchange in global capital markets where trade execution speed is critical. The solution offers financial services firms such as brokers, hedge funds, exchanges, asset managers, and pre and post-trade services providers a fully managed, highly available optimized infrastructure, providing easy scalability and growth as trading firms enter new geographies and asset classes.

Cloud computing is the talk of the town. What is all the buzz about? Cloud computing provides companies the ability to quickly and cost effectively deploy new hardware, storage and software solutions. Cloud Computing avoids the need to utilize large capital budget investments to introduce new applications and solutions to the Enterprise.  Cloud computing also supports our new mobile world. Moving the applications and infrastructure to the cloud makes them available from any device – providing the ability to work anywhere anytime and have full access to the entire infrastructure required.

With all the good news about cloud computing what are the issues? The number one issue is latency. What is latency? It is the time it takes for a signal to travel from one point to another in telecom networks.  Businesses’ increased reliance on telecom networks and improved processing speeds for computer networks and the Local Area Networks (LANs)/Wide Area Networks (WANs) that interconnect them, have combined to make the speed at which a signal travels in a telecom network more noticeable and critical.  Technologies such as cloud computing cannot be successful if the end user does not have a good experience.

Applications which are most susceptible to latency are those which depend most heavily on high transaction rate processes which drive CPU per second cycles, memory and storage read/write requests, and server requests. Examples of latency sensitive applications range from multimedia streaming, video transcoding, multi-player network gaming to telesurgery and computerized trading. CIOs operating private clouds as well as large cloud service providers need a flexible and robust network architecture that reduces latency to acceptable levels for their particular application.

Cloud computing networks are moving away from the typical three-layer switching topology in which access switches are connected to a large pool of aggregation or distribution switches that are then connected to the core. The concern with the traditional model is latency — it forces packets to stop at hops at every layer and doesn’t provide any-to-any communication between the hundreds of servers and migrating VMs (virtual machines) necessary in a cloud environment.

It is expected that, over time, enterprises will build cloud networks with a distribution layer of 10 GbE switches (and ultimately 40 GbE and 100 GbE once these standards are approved) that is flattened or broadened out, becoming the communication link between servers with as few blocks as possible. This middle layer of Ethernet switches will be built as a larger fabric so that enterprises can manage them as one or a couple of large switches.

How do you choose the correct connectivity that will take into account all of these latency variables? You want to go with a partner that has a reputation for managing latency and has always designed on layer 1 transport. CFN Services has been established as the low latency leader in the financial services electronic trading market. Where a millisecond of latency can mean the difference of a million dollars, gaining a reputation as the low latency leader provides CFN Services unprecedented credibility.  CFN Services Global Low Latency Exchange Infrastructure separates itself from other networks because CFN is a not a carrier. CFN has built a custom “community” Trading Cloud on this infrastructure which enables many major trading firms to compete at the speed of light. The network performance demands in this type of environment are unrivaled by most enterprise cloud requirement.

CFN Services is carrier neutral provider who designs and implements low latency networks. CFN understands all the variables and components of latency and has optimized their Global Low Latency Exchange Infrastructure to reduce any undue latency.  Take advantage of the network that is supporting major banks and trading firms for your cloud computing. Hit the ground running by partnering with CFN and take advantage of COATS – Cloud Optimized Access and Transport Services and their already optimized Global Low Latency Exchange Infrastructure and ensure you have the reach and low latency required to support your cloud strategy.

BM&FBovespa does it again.  Operating one of Brazil’s biggest securities exchange, gained the most in a year in Sao Paulo trading after JPMorgan Chase & Co. said the stock price doesn’t reflect the company’s growth prospects. With a 7.24% rise on May 10.  This follows their announcement of going over 70,000 in January. Not to mention another landmark as the number of single stock option contracts traded on its derivatives section in March exceeded that traded on any of the largest US options exchanges, according to data from the World Federation of Exchanges. The Brazilian bourse traded 87.5m that month, compared with 79.3m at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, 66.6m at the International Securities Exchange, and 58.9m at Nasdaq OMX PHLX.

All of this makes BM&FBovespa an exchange to not be ignored. In this year of asset and geographical diversification in trading strategies, BM&FBovespa is expected to see unusually higher growth of volume.

CFN Services is proud to be part of this growth, by providing lowest latency connectivity from all the major trading venues back to Sao Paulo. CFN Services, is the only provider to offer the Latency Improvement Plan. When you sign your contract with CFN you know the latency you will receive today and are committed to improve that latency during the duration of the contract – ensuring you are still the lowest latency in the future.

For lowest latency connections, capacity is limited – get in the queue now to reserve not just your low latency to Sao Paulo for today, but ensure you are part of the next network improvement plan

Contact us now:  lowlatency@cfnservices.com    703-788-6633

CFN Services is committed to helping Financial Service firms continually lower their latency. Offering customers not just low latency options today, but also for the future by continuing the success of their Low Latency Improvement Plan. Introduced in early 2009, CFN Services has upheld their commitment to continually lower latency for their existing customers. As we know the best latency today, is not the best latency in 12 months, which makes it imperative to choose a partner who is committed and guaranteed to continually work on optimizing their network.

Here is an update of some of the most recent announcements by CFN Services, which enumerate their commitment to the financial services trading market place:

• Drastically reduced latency from Chicago – NY/NJ
• Offering a Latency Improvement Plan Guarantee – Committing to lower latency for today and tomorrow
• Proving bandwidth options from 50mb and up bundled or unbundled to include collocation and multiple locations
• Announcing Loyalty Programs for latency, pricing and promotions
• Continual expansion of the their CFN Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure, connecting global exchanges via an Optimized Low Latency Infrastructure

CFN Services has continually set themselves apart in the race for Alpha, due to the intelligence and experience they bring to Network and Proximity Optimization. Utilizing FiberSource®, knowledge based platform which provides them the ability to view all available fiber, including that of Utilities, Carriers, Dark Fiber and Collocation Providers; in order to optimize turnkey network routes or provide custom network solutions specific to a customer’s exact requirements and priorities, allows CFN the ability to ensure that a trading firm’s connectivity plan drives their trading strategy.

CFN Services currently operates a low latency global infrastructure connecting over 20 data centers globally in Toronto Metro, New York Metro, New Jersey Metro, Chicago Metro, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, London Metro, and Sao Paulo.

The Internet has provided a number of benefits to both businesses and governments as it provides the ability to move information to a number of different locations very quickly. It also allows organizations to drive transparency, a key demand among government entities. In an effort to be more transparent, federal agencies are implementing initiatives to move more information to the Internet. This move will also help to drive collaboration between federal government, local government and citizens. One agency in particular recently required an optimization of their existing network and a network upgrade to support the additional traffic to its site as a result of moving more information and supporting collaboration.

This particular agency operates multiple facilities and data centers stretching between 78 cities and 24 states, making it necessary to find a way to consolidate their network to find management and cost efficiencies. At the same time, this agency also needed to increase capacity on the network to support new applications. Read More

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By now there’s no doubt about it: mobile operators need to get their backhaul networks in condition to meet the burgeoning market for anytime, anywhere data access. Backhaul, once considered the humdrum side of an operator’s network, has become the topic du jour now that the mobile phone customershave shifted to smartphones and are taking advantage of data-hungry services in a big way. Earlier this month, AT&T reported that its wireless data traffic has grown more than 5,000 percent over the past three years, largely due to smartphones, which are used by about 40 percent of its post-paid customer base. All operators have to contend with this growth, and quickly: smartphones should represent the vast majority (65%) of phones sold in the country by 2012, according to Creative Strategies, an analyst firm. Operators are taking steps to prepare their networks to meet the expected demand, and the process of identifying specific backhaul needs and configuring the best solutions will force companies to bring the backhaul problem to the forefront of their infrastructure and business planning. This is a closer look at the available options and considerations operators must keep in mind as they prepare to build out this part of their networks.