About Us
Leading global technology service provider
General
4X Solutions is a leading global technology service provider for the financial services sector. Its pioneering approach and a solid reputation for service and performance has enabled it to attract tens of thousands of clients from around the world since its launch in 2008.
Based in the UK and US with a worldwide presence, 4X Solutions has utilised its trading technology expertise to deliver high-quality services to support foreign exchange traders. These range from fully white labelled products for financial institutions to bespoke hosting and management solutions.
Catering for a fast-moving, real-time market, the business delivers solutions from its fully owned infrastructure, in a secure environment. The solutions are hosted in world-class data centres that provide a highly scalable infrastructure and total resilience.
4X Solutions prides itself on its full in-house capability for all technical and development requirements on a truly global scale, as well as its highly innovative and creative approach to developing and delivering technology solutions to the financial services sector, tailoring services to customers’ needs. The business offers unique solutions for the effective management of user billing with a multi-lingual support capability.
UK Financial-Grade Datacenter
We understand that without a solid foundation, it is impossible to run financial-grade services or applications. This is why the entire infrastructure has been built around the combination of best-of-breed technology, and world-class data centre facilities. Some of the equipment that is used could be seen as overkill, but as performance and security are of critical importance, this is seen as a necessity.
Equinix LD4 is one of over 5 buildings on-campus covering over 34,000 square meters of colocation space and interconnect capability with over 400 companies, Equinix has rapidly become the industry standard for data centre hosting of financial applications; as such it was a logical location for our servers.
We have a large number of racks hosted in this facility with on-site spares and remote-hands to complete any maintenance tasks required.
Power
Power is supplied by 2 diverse 40 Megawatt feeds from the National Grid with N + 2 diesel generators as backup.
Cooling
Cooling is run in an N+2 redundancy manner to ensure both temperature and humidity in technical space is maintained to industry-accepted standards and efficiency.
Fire
Fire suppression is in place across all areas with double-interlocked dry pipe pre-action.
Security
Security is operated to a military standard with 24 hour manned security and intruder alarms in place, along with biometric identification required to access the data halls.
Network Connectivity
Without reliable connections to the Internet, the best equipment in the world is of no use. This is why we have invested heavily in ensuring that the network is always up.
We have a combination of 7 Tier 1 IP transit providers, one of which owns one of the largest financial grade networks in the world. Through their networks, we have the quickest possible route to New York and low-latency access to the key trading venues throughout the world. This overall results in faster access to the servers for clients, and quicker trade execution.
Due to the carrier-neutral element of LD4, network-to-network interconnects can be created to partners’ systems. This is one way that a reduction in platform latency can be achieved by ensuring that traffic goes direct rather than round the Internet. Whilst this is an effective approach, the preferred strategy is for 4X Solutions to host Metatrader Data centres locally. This provides zero latency for clients accessing the server and reduces the overall bandwidth going in and out of each network. For the ultimate in connectivity, both approaches can be combined to provide a world-class service offering.
We currently have direct interconnects with a number of brokers who are marketing the service as an “Ultra Low Latency Trading Environment”. We are seeing a lot of customers wanting to fine-tune their trading in this way, as this is an approach taken by institutions for years.
Security
When dealing with anything of a financial nature, security is of utmost importance. This is why we protect the networks by Checkpoint firewall clusters. Checkpoint is by far the market leader in the security field, boasting 100% coverage of the Fortune 100, and 90% of the Fortune 500. A combination of traditional firewalling, Intrusion Prevention and other techniques are used to mitigate the chance of an attack.
Security has been taken seriously from day one, which is why there has not been a single instance of the networks being compromised. Due to the sensitive credit card data that is stored for billing purposes, we are also regularly PCI DSS audited/scanned with the results reported back to the card issuers.
