Voltaire's 6048 Switch - Not Just For Cloud, Low Latency Trading Too

Given it was announced at VMware's VMworld conference and partner-fest in San Francisco earlier this week, it's not surprising that Voltaire positioned its new Vantage 6048 10gE switch as "optimised for cloud computing." And while it certainly is pitched at 'cloud' data centres with thousands of servers, it is also very relevant to the needs of medium-sized server deployments typically found underpinning low-latency financial trading applications, says Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, at the networking company.

First, some basics: The 6048 is a top-of-the rack switch, which features 48 ports of 10GbE line rate connectivity in a single 1U device. It provides non-blocking switching throughput of 960 Gbps, and power consumption of just 6.3 watts per port.

Both the small size and low power consumption make it attractive to trading firms operating in co-location environments, where space and power consumption translate directly to costs. The 6048 is big brother to the 6024 10gE switch introduced by Voltaire in June and together with the 8500 core switch represents a fairly new direction for the company, which previously delivered solely InfiniBand networking products. In line with accepted thinking, Somekh says that compared to InfiniBand, 10gE is "a bit less performance but ubiquitous."

As well as networking hardware, Voltaire also delivers a number of software products. One is its Unified Fabric Manager (UFM), a management tool for both 10gE and InfiniBand, which can be used to monitor and measure both latency and jitter for multicast traffic, and determine the causes. Somekh says that one financial markets firm that was evaluating UFM actually used it to discover an application that was generating rogue packets that were impacting performance. "The purchase order soon followed," Somekh adds.

Another software product is the Voltaire Messaging Accelerator - or VMA - which accelerates the performance of messaging-oriented applications, reducing latency by as much as 50% and increasing throughput. VMA requires no changes to the messaging applications, and is supported on Voltaire's InfiniBand products and on 10gE products from Voltaire and others.

Somekh notes that in real-life trading system implementations, the majority of the latency comes from the system software, middleware and applications, and not from the networking fabric itself. VMA works by providing a software library that bypasses an operating system's standard TCP and UDP network stack and offloads processing of messages to the network interface itself, also removing network processing overhead from the main CPU.

Indeed, the VMA software received a recent thumbs up from Nasdaq OMX, which used it in its implementation at the Singapore Exchange. “We have been very impressed by how well Voltaire’s VMA software has operated for us in the development and testing of SGX’s new trading platform,” says Mats Andersson, CTO at Nasdaq OMX. “Voltaire’s VMA software provided most of the latency improvement without requiring any changes to the application. With this solution, we are able to fully utilise the performance benefits of InfiniBand.”

Voltaire recently reported second quarter 2010 revenues of $16.6 million, an increase of 54% over the same quarter in 2009. Somekh says that a third of the company's business comes from financial services, and that this year it has built business away from its core U.S. focus with expansion in Europe and Asia.