Voltaire teamed with HP, Intel and Reuters to offer a joint low-latency trading solution at the show that uses its Grid Director InfiniBand-based switches (see related story, page 8). The four vendors announced benchmark results yesterday for the new combined solution in STAC tests in which latency was held constant and messages per second were increased 50 percent versus a similar setup with an Ethernet switch (rather than Voltaire's InfiniBand-based switch).
One key aspect of this announcement, according to Nigel Woodward, director of financial services solutions marketing at Intel, is that the combined solution has been proven (by STAC and in the vendors' labs). "Wall Street firms want products that have been tested," he says.
Also in the network infrastructure space, Solace introduced at the show an intelligent routing card — an enhancement to its VRS/32 network router that lets data travel directly from exchanges to a client without passing through a ticker plant, which the company says reduces latency by up to 100 times.
"Latency is becoming such a differentiator and competitive advantage in a lot of markets, algorithmic trading being one, that companies are looking very hard for the next technology that's going to make them a little faster than their competitors," says Peter Ashton, VP at Solace. "A lot of forward-looking investment banks are seeing that they can do message routing 10 to 100 times faster in hardware and get latency that's one-tenth what it would be in a software solution, which offers a huge competitive advantage to whoever gets that into their network first." Solace customers, Ashton says, see on average 400 microseconds of latency across the router, regardless of the overall volume.
The new card Solace is rolling out, the VRS/32-08 Assured Delivery Module, fits into the router's chassis and provides high throughput and low latency for "persistent messaging," guaranteeing that messages get to right place, for functions like order routing and funds transfer where messages cannot be lost, according to Ashton.
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