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Cisco DAL Software Accelerates TIBCO and Wombat Market Data Environments
Cisco High Performance Solution Reduces Latency Up to 81% in Multicast Infrastructure for Automated Trading Applications
| Source: Cisco Systems, Inc.
NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - September 17, 2007) - High Performance on Wall Street -- Cisco®
(NASDAQ : CSCO ) today announced a new server host and fabric software, known
as Datagram Acceleration Layer (DAL), designed specifically to accelerate
multicast-based market data infrastructures for automated trading
applications. When combined with Cisco InfiniBand Server Fabric Switches,
the new Cisco DAL software will help customers to handle rising messages
rates, while reducing the message delivery latency between server nodes.
The result delivers a competitive advantage to capital markets firms,
through greatly improved performance in determining the state of the
market, and higher success rates in completing trades.
Increasing message rates and the continued growth of algorithmic trading,
combined with new regulations such as the Regulation National Market System
(RegNMS) and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID),
require capital markets firms to look for the highest performing IT
infrastructure and applications possible. Implementing a high-capacity,
low-latency infrastructure designed to handle traffic spikes can provide
the competitive advantages needed to excel in the capital markets industry,
while meeting strict new regulations.
Datagram Acceleration Layer (DAL)
Automated trading platforms consist of trading applications with a
middleware layer to communicate between the applications. A market data
infrastructure with multicast traffic is used by the middleware layer to
communicate between servers. Multicast market data traffic is transported
transparently by the DAL software across the infrastructure. The Cisco DAL
software is designed to significantly accelerate the applications and
middleware without requiring any changes to a trading application. It
accomplishes this by creating a user space library, which eliminates buffer
copies and reduces context switches, the main cause of transport related
latency, latency jitter, and low message rate capacity in automated trading
infrastructures. The DAL software is available now as part of a select
customer access program.
DAL Testing with TIBCO Rendezvous®
TIBCO® and Cisco rigorously tested the new DAL software on the TIBCO
Rendezvous messaging platform to help ensure compatibility and benchmark
performance of the solution. The TIBCO Rendezvous platform is comprised of
two main components -- the Rendezvous Application Programming Interface
(API) and Rendezvous Daemon. Leveraging a distributed architecture,
application information flows from the API to Rendezvous Daemon and then
out to the network. TIBCO rvperf and rvlat utilities were used to benchmark
the performance of the solution. Test results showed message rates
improved by more than 300%, and latency was reduced by 38% on average.
TIBCO customers using the Cisco DAL software will be able to improve both
message rates and latency without having to modify their application or the
TIBCO Rendezvous environment.
"TIBCO Rendezvous is able to support the mission-critical real-time
messaging requirements of some of the most demanding customers in the
global capital markets today," said Jeff Kristick, vice president, Product
Marketing, TIBCO. "By joining forces with Cisco to combine two
industry-proven solutions, we are able to unlock more value for our
customers with immediate performance gains that propel market data
distribution and integration to new levels, without impacting existing
technologies or implementations."
"In developing the new DAL software, we started with the challenges our
customers were experiencing, then concentrated not just on the engineering
solution, but also on developing the technology relationships necessary to
bring to the market fully validated and tested solutions that customers
can trust," said Krish Ramakrishnan, vice president and general manager of
the Server Virtualization Business Unit, Cisco. "Tested solutions enable
our mutual customers to deploy new technology reliably, quickly, and with
easier implementation."
DAL Testing With Wombat by the Securities Technology Analysis Center
An independent study conducted by the Securities Technology Analysis Center
(STAC) consisted of a rigorous benchmarking exercise with actual US options
data from an OPRA feed played at accelerated rates to simulate the
throughput demands customers will face in the near future. The tests used
Wombat software with infrastructure consisting of Cisco low latency
InfiniBand Server Fabric Switches and the new DAL software. STAC conducted
the tests with standard Wombat tools and procedures and performed multiple
runs to ensure repeatability of the results. STAC compared the performance
of standard UDP/GigE to that of Cisco InfiniBand infrastructure with the
new DAL software. The tests focused on a single server publishing data
with an average message size of 197 bytes to several consuming
applications. Test results showed that mean transport latency was reduced
from 240 microseconds to 50 microseconds, an 80% reduction. Moreover, the
variation in latency decreased by a factor of four, demonstrating the
superior ability of Cisco InfiniBand and DAL to weather the traffic spikes
common to market data. A full description of the test methodology and
results can be found at www.STACresearch.com/cisco.
"Trading firms want to minimize the average latency at every step in their
architectures," said Peter Lankford, Director of STAC. "And in some cases
they actually care more about minimizing the variation in latency. The
DAL-based InfiniBand solution from Cisco showed very significant benefits
on both fronts."
"When combined with a complete market data connectivity solution such as
Wombat Platform, the Cisco DAL software provides an innovative means of
further lowering system latency, and we are happy to be driving performance
in the capital markets with Cisco," said Conor Allen, Co-principal of
Wombat's Middleware division.
Cisco Server Fabric Switches for HPC Environments
Cisco Server Fabric Switches use standards-based InfiniBand technology to
provide a high performance unified fabric for connecting servers together
into grids of compute resources. Cisco Server Fabric Switches provide up
to 288 ports of non-blocking, InfiniBand 4X that can operate in either
20-Gbps double data rate (DDR) or 10-Gbps single data rate (SDR) mode for
server and inter-switch connectivity. InfiniBand takes advantage of Remote
Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology greatly reducing latency, latency
jitter and CPU utilization while increasing the throughput and message rate
capacity of automated trading environments.
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