High Speed Network for Financial Services HPC Applications

The application was a self-contained, stand-alone compute entity where all of the components (servers, networks, storage, etc) would be pre-wired and needed to fit in a single 42RU rack.

This application rack could be rolled into a datacenter, powered up, uplinks connected and it would be instantly operational. This rack was optimized for ease-of-deployment in large-scale facilities.

Blade servers are the most efficient way of accommodating the required number of servers, integrated networking, power & KVM functionality.

Another requirement for this application is a high-speed network for:

• Low latency intercommunication between Blade Servers
• IP Storage
• Carrying TCP/IP to the Internet

A number of network technologies could be used to accommodate these requirements, but the simplest and best performing solution is the combination of BNT 10G Ethernet switches and NetEffect 10G NICs to provided the best customer value.

This solution collapses multiple communication fabrics into one thereby reducing power, expense and complexity.

There are no products currently linked to this solution

Other Blade server-oriented SOLUTIONS from same company

The network infrastructure is a key differentiator for these online gaming companies. They need a high-speed network for two purposes:

• Intercommunication between their Blade servers and
• Carrying TCP/IP to the Internet.

Multiple networking technologies are available on the market today, but none fits the specific needs of the online gaming community quite as completely as the 10Gb Ethernet NICs from Chelsio Communications coupled with the 10GbE switches from BLADE Network Technologies.

There was a need for a low latency 10Gbps network that:
A) Was easily understood by network engineers.
B) Forwarded TCP traffic at near line rate without consuming all available CPU resources.
The 10G Ethernet NIC from Chelsio provided this functionality.

In this IBM BladeCenter-based solution with 10GbE from Blade Network Technologies and Chelsio Communications, the customer was able to reduce the market data latency to give them an advantage over their competitors, allowing them to profit from a difference of milliseconds. In addition, they were able to increase their network throughput capacity to handle the growing market data volumes where update-rates have increased 2 to 6 times a year.

Automated trading is used aggressively in North America and in Europe, and is growing worldwide. Maintaining a latency edge is imperative to stay competitive and also to defend against many new latency arbritrage opportunities.

The other challenge was to plan for the rapidly growing market data traffic volumes as update rates increase 2 to 6 times per year. Additionally, there are enormous amounts of real-time data that is generated internally by the company. Most companies have traditionally used Gigabit Ethernet for their market data systems, but this is becoming a competitive disadvantage in today's business.

Changing to a closed solution like InfiniBand was an option as it provided lower latency and higher throughput over Gigabit Ethernet, but InfiniBand required additional training and expertise. InfiniBand was also found to be lower performing than 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

Using an IBM BladeCenter solution based on 10GbE technology from BLADE Networks and Chelsio Communications provided the throughput and latency improvements that were second to none. STAC Research verified the results and found the latency numbers to be the lowest they had ever seen.

The 10GbE solution by BLADE Network Technologies and Chelsio Communications provided the lowest latency and highest throughput solution for Reuters Market Data System version 6. Considerable power was also saved.