Content about Messaging, Data Fabrics and Local Networking

Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of end-to-end connectivity solutions for servers and storage systems, today announced record financial results in its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2011, ended Dec. 31, 2011.

Intel Corporation today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with QLogic to acquire the product lines of and certain assets related to its InfiniBand business. A significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to accept offers to join Intel.

Intilop, a pioneer and a recognized leader in providing complex Ultra-Low latency networking IP building blocks and systems, today announced their new 4th Gen SX-Series TCP Offload Engine (TOE) and UDP Offload Engine (UOE) IPs based around enhanced TOE Architecture. These Industry leading Ultra-Low latency 10G TOE and UOE IP products have fully integrated EMAC with optional PCIe/DMA block, that can also be combined as a system to provide Ultra-High performance NIC functionality.

With a new version of its VMA software and new network cards, Mellanox is pushing down latency and jitter for both Ethernet and InfiniBand.  Low-Latency.com spoke with the vendor's director of business development Asaf Wachtel on the state of the art, and what's next..

Any trading technology firm that is co-headquartered in New York City and Austin, Texas, gets my attention, even when it's been flying under the radar for the past few years.  Now, Broadway Technology is taking investment from its clients - including Goldman Sachs - to accelerate its rate of growth.  Low-Latency.com caught up with the company's CTO Joshua Walsky to find out more.

Informatica Corporation, the world’s number one independent leader in data integration software, today announced an OEM agreement with options trading software provider, Blue Trading Systems (BTS). Under the agreement, BTS will make Informatica Ultra Messaging software the low-latency messaging backbone of its high-performance options trading platform.

6WIND, the industry standard for commercial multicore packet processing software, today announced the availability of a low-latency network layer as part of its 6WINDGate software solution. Optimized for high-frequency trading (HFT) applications, 6WINDGate provides low-latency protocols such as TCP Proxy (Termination and Retransmission), IP Forwarding and firewall. Along with 6WINDGate’s high-performance routing capabilities, these enhancements allow HFT Networking Equipment manufacturers to provide solutions without difficult-to-maintain, custom hardware technologies based on FPGAs or ASICs.

Trading technology consulting firm Citihub has released highlights of performance testing it completed on Tibco Software's FTL middleware running on Hardware Computer's over-clocked, liquid-cooled Detonator workstation. Not surprisingly, the results are the fastest seen to date for inter-process communication.

Automated trading in the financial markets continues to grow, as it is adopted beyond equities into other asset classes, and as its use expands globally.

While some classes of automated trading – such as High Frequency Trading, Arbitrage and Market Making – continue to require a continued focus on reducing latency, from milliseconds to microseconds to nanoseconds, much of the marketplace is not as latency sensitive.

Gnodal, a systems company delivering industry-leading performance, port density and low power to the high performance data center with GS-Series switches; and Solarflare, the leader in application-intelligent 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) networking hardware and software, today announced an industry-leading 3.4 microsecond (64-byte TCP) and 3.2 microsecond (64-byte UDP) half round-trip latency, achieved under application performance tests. Such ultra-low latency under load is required in mission-critical, time- sensitive applications ranging from high frequency trading to cloud, big data, and high performance computing workloads.

Remember Blade Network Technologies? Well, a year ago it was snapped up by IBM, and given the charter to network IBM's enterprise server and storage products, to provide a unified system. Trading firms - and exchanges - were big customers of BNT, so Low-Latency.com chatted to the company's founder Vikram Mehta, now vice president, System Networking, at IBM to find out how IBM is continuing to focus on that business, and about new collaborations within IBM.

Panel: Low-Latency Connectivity – From Start to Finish

Connecting trading systems to market centres is generally the biggest contributor to latency, as data traverses local data fabrics and messaging middleware within trading firms and co-lo centres, and both metro and long-haul fibre networks.

This panel explored recent technology developments and futures for each segment of the electronic trading connectivity chain - wide area networks and fibre connects, co-location, local networks, and network interfaces, providing delegates with essential insight to guide their own strategic directions and deployments.

* Pete Harris, Publisher & Editor, Low-Latency.com (Moderator)
* Michael Cooper, Client Technology Officer – Radianz, BT Global Banking and Financial Markets
* John Taylor, CTO, Gnodal
* Tim King, Director of Product Management, Level3 Communications
* David Riddoch, Chief Software Architect, Solarflare Communications
* Michael Ritter, Vice President, Technical Marketing, ADVA Optical Networking