CFN Enables Cloud, Web Services App Access

Network provider CFN Services will this week unveil a new service that provides clients co-located in datacenters where the vendor has a presence with access to products and tools that are either cloud-based or hosted in other datacenters, from third-party data and trading applications to cloud-based storage and compute resources.

The new service, dubbed AppHub, will complement the vendor’s existing network of 70 datacenters worldwide and its Alpha connectivity platform of third-party services, by making access to cloud and web services available via its secure platform, and has partnered with Amazon Web Services as the first source of applications on the platform.

Mark Casey, president and chief executive of CFN, says firms are looking to leverage cloud and web services in two key initial ways—to shift storage of ever-increasing datasets into the cloud, and to be able to leverage on-demand compute resources to run processes that require high performance and speed, where thousands of commodity servers in a third-party datacenter can provide more power and complete the task faster than a firm’s internal high-performance servers.

“CFN’s core market remains high-end high-frequency traders running their own applications, so the main demand will be from those firms to extend their capabilities via on-demand compute power and storage, and to make it as though those are actually within your proximity venue,” Casey says. “Space and power inside these liquidity centers is very expensive… [and] every firm is looking at ways to take costs out of their business.”

However, Casey says firms still have security concerns about running applications in public clouds, as well as concerns about the cost of implementing third-party private communications lines between their co-location datacenters and cloud service facilities—especially if the co-lo center is located in a financial center such as Chicago and the cloud centers are on the East and West Coasts of the US.

Cloud Storm
“The drawback is that firms won’t connect over the public internet,” Casey says. “It’s an oxymoron that you have on-demand compute and storage but have to sign up for a 36-month lease for a private line to connect to it.”

As a result of CFN’s presence in key datacenters, accessing web services and cloud via AppHub should be as seamless to trading clients as cross-connecting to any other service co-located in the same datacenter or available via CFN’s Alpha platform, he adds.

“Services available on the Alpha platform sit in the liquidity venues, but those applications also need to talk to things outside the platform, and that’s what AppHub does—it allows firms to connect to things that aren’t on Alpha,” which could range from hosted trading platforms to on-demand datasets and tools, Casey says.

“The applications that people want to get to are growing every day,” he says, adding that AppHub will simplify and streamline the complexity of reaching applications or content that aren’t suitable to be deployed directly within co-location centers, effectively bringing these services into a firm’s in-datacenter connectivity environment. “This reduces friction and opens opportunities for the new generation of service providers not suitable to be on Alpha, but who would be available on Amazon Web Services…. For companies creating apps that leverage the cloud, Amazon Web Services is the 800 lb gorilla.”