Data center service provider Savvis announced Monday that one of its major clients will be expanding its footprint in two of its facilities to support two new financial exchanges to be launched in early 2010, according to a company statement.

BATS Global Markets will take more space in one of Savvis data centers in Weehawken, N.J., and in its Docklands facility in London to support the new US Equity Options Exchange and the second US Equities Exchange.

"This expansion will allow the more than 400 members of BATS Exchange to leverage existing connectivity to also access the BATS options exchange and second equities exchange," BATS COO Chris Isaacson said in a statement. "We believe this is the optimal use of existing technical infrastructure rather than forcing our members to move data centers or connectivity links."

The announcement comes as competition continues heating up among colocation and network interconnect providers to attract financial service firms as customers, with data center operators racing to provide lower latencies and broader network access options in a world of split-millisecond trading.

Last week, Telx - another major player in the space - launched a new package of services aimed directly at financial service firms and Equinix - a large global player - announced an agreement to buy Switch and Data, adding 34 data centers (more than Savvis's total number) to its roster and bringing the number of facilities it owns to 79.

Savvis's major recent win in the space was a deal with Thomson Reuters to host the firm's vendor-neutral hosting solution for the financial sector in its data centers. In the beginning of next year - or around the same time as BATS's two new exchanges launch - trading firms will be able to install their applications on Thomson Reuters servers located in six Savvis facilities in the US, Europe and Asia.

In an interview with DatacenterDynamics earlier this month, Savvis SVP and Managing Director for the US Bill Fathers said many financial firms will "flock" to the data centers that host Thomson Reuters to have low-latency access to markets the "800-pound gorilla" serves.

Today, Savvis operates 28 data centers globally, providing a total of 1.4 million square feet of data center floor.

NaviSite makes gain in cloud-based disaster recovery
Another data center company to announce a major new deal on Monday was NaviSite. The managed hosting provider said it had secured a contract to provide disaster recovery services to a large US public/private organization that provides credit to farmers and rural homeowners and businesses.

Farmer Mac - the organization whose current hardware platform is at the end of its useful life - will be using NaviSite's cloud-based disaster recovery solution.

"We needed a solution that would both scale and assure continued regulatory compliance with SAS-70, as well as Sarbanes-Oxley," Marmer Mac COO Tom Stenson said in a statement. "With a management portal that makes it easy to monitor and manage our environment, the NaviSite solution addresses our needs, and enables us to focus our attention on core business initiatives."

The NaviSite announcement comes less than one week after Terremark - a major player in the data center space that also targets federal clients - rolled out its own cloud-based disaster recovery solution called Virtualized Disaster Recovery.