Cisco, NYSE Team on Ethernet Middleware Solution
January 29, 2009
Cisco Systems and NYSE Euronext’s trading technology arm are jointly developing an Ethernet-based messaging system they say will speed up automated trading environments and bolster application performance.
The solution combines the Data Fabric middleware of NYSE Technologies--until recently known as NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions--with Intel Corp.’s NetEffect 10 gigabit Ethernet network interface cards and Cisco’s Nexus 5000 series switches and Remote Direct Memory Access Accelerated Buffers. Cisco says that in tests the system handled more than 1 million messages per second, with application-level latencies under 100 microseconds.
“Financial services customers look at performance, specifically a low-latency and low-jitter environment, as a competitive advantage in automated trading,” said Pramod Srivatsa, product manager for Cisco’s server access and virtualization business unit. “The quicker you get market data, and the quicker you can process it and send orders back to the exchange--there’s money to be made there.”
Cisco, noted Srivatsa, saw an opportunity to “add value at a very strategic level to a mission-critical application. We asked, ‘What can we do from the network perspective to provide the maximum performance benefits possible, and who do we need to partner with?’” Customers, he added, pointed to NYSE’s Data Fabric as one the leading software products being used for high-performance environments.
Conor Allen, VP of high-performance messaging at NYSE Technologies, explained in a prepared statement that the company is collaborating with Cisco “to bring to market an integrated messaging Ethernet solution based on Data Fabric that offers our customers the ability to build high-performance trading infrastructures that deliver the performance they need for their mission-critical applications without requiring custom hardware.”
NYSE acquired Data Fabric, formerly Wombat Data Fabric, in its purchase of market data technology provider Wombat Financial Software in March. Wombat was combined with NYSE’s TransactTools connectivity and messaging business to form the exchange operator’s commercial technology division. In June, the unit introduced a hosted platform that allows technology vendors to offer applications and services to market participants on the Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure.
The joint middleware solution will help clients “build market data infrastructures designed to handle rising message rates, while reducing the message delivery latency and latency jitter between server nodes,” according to Cisco. “The result is a more accurate view into the state of the market, plus higher success rates in completing trades.” The system uses a standards-based, 10-gigabit-per-second data center Ethernet.
“Financial industry customers want high-performance networking without being locked into proprietary architectures,” said Tom Swinford, VP and general manager of Intel’s local-area network access division, in a statement. “Ethernet’s broad deployment and track record of sustained innovation and performance increases make it the ideal, easily deployable solution for our customers.”
