Lime Brokerage Launches Disaster Recovery Site

Lime Brokerage is unveiling a start-up disaster-recovery site (DRS) in Waltham, Mass., to create a completely redundant order-processing environment. The new standby facility, which is expected to be up and running in July, can be activated in a matter of seconds should any event disrupt Lime's primary data center in New York City, according to the company.

"We wanted to establish a disaster-recovery site that was outside of the immediate New York City telecom and power grid and that would ensure access to all the global markets," says Michael Richter, executive vice president, business development, at Lime Brokerage, a securities broker that provides execution services to institutions, hedge funds and professional traders that acquire access to automated trading and algorithms.

In the event that Lime had to reroute processing to the DRS, "The degradation in service will be extremely minor -- within a second or two we'll be able to reroute any order processing," says Richter.

Clients that colocate servers in Lime's primary data center will have the option of collocating backup servers, to minimize the chance that any trades will be lost in the event that the primary site fails and transitions over to the DRS.

All the routing to exchanges and electronic communications networks will be redundant, including market data services, Richter adds. Lime routes orders to the New York Stock Exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, as well as Nasdaq and ECNs. "We want the experience to be transparent to the customer in the event that orders were, in effect, being routed through the disaster-recovery site," he explains.

Lime picked Waltham because there is a lot of securities-related IT talent in the greater Boston area, according to Richter. "We viewed it as an opportunity to set up this disaster recovery and development center up there," he says. Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio