TheHUB: fair exchange colocation infrastructure as a service

Design view, not an as-built record. FPGA: field-programmable gate array.

TheHUB cage sits in Equinix TY15, Tokyo. Its network cabinet holds two spines split by traffic class, one for market data and one for order entry and internet traffic, each the failover for the other; two cage leaves; a border leaf; and a DoubleZero device beside the market-data spine, which exchanges market data with the DoubleZero network. The cage leaves serve what runs in the cage, each on its own line: own servers, bare metal, the matching engine, on-prem cloud and validators. The border leaf runs over a cross-connect, at the demarcation point, to external participants. Coiled fiber makes each path to the spines the same length, so traffic from one tenant to another is equalized within each traffic class. A GPS (Global Positioning System) clock drives FPGA (field-programmable gate array) timestamps at access. The FPGA also turns the market data from a venue's matching engine into multicast, which runs up the market-data spine and out to the cage leaves; the border leaf carries no market data. A direct link from the border leaf, on the order-entry and internet side, runs to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) gateway outside the building; it is not equalized.