Low Latency and High Bandwidth

In financial markets, market data applications must deliver information at ever-increasing rates and with minimal latency. Customers subscribing to market data feeds expect timely and fair access to information that they need to perform algorithmic trading calculations and execute trades—so market data arriving even a few microseconds late can have huge negative impact on a financial trading firm. Applications for financial firms require large-scale deployments of servers with multi-core CPU’s, more memory and a low-latency means of transporting data across their network.

Currently Gigabit Ethernet networks are reaching their limits in bandwidth, maintainability and latency. Multi-core processors, virtualization and converged storage and data networks require an efficient solution for adding bandwidth.

While InfiniBand offers low latency and much higher bandwidth than Gigabit Ethernet, we believe InfiniBand is not always as fast or as reliable as advertised, and is not that easy to deploy and maintain. Scaling to 10 Gigabit Ethernet is a natural evolution for Gigabit Ethernet networks, and doesn’t require expertise in deploying and maintaining separate network fabrics.

Scale-out with Less Rack Space and Better Performance

Traditional three-tier data center architectures consisting of server access switches, distribution switches and large core routers take up a lot of space. And they can require data to travel many hops just to communicate with other servers in the same rack or row. A new approach that flattens the architecture to denser racks and rows can shrink data center footprint, enable faster communication across fewer hops, and minimize overall application latency.

Ideal for dense data center deployments

Leading financial institutions are deploying market applications through data centers populated with dense rows of server, storage and networking racks. With ever-increasing processing power of servers comes an increase in power consumption as more devices are being deployed in a smaller footprint. In fact, in data centers, power and cooling can cost more than the equipment itself.

The answer: BLADE Network Technologies

BLADE Network Technologies is the industry leader in high bandwidth, low latency networking for both blade server and rack server environment. BLADE’s Gigabit and 10Gb Ethernet blade and rack switches can add tremendous power to the financial services data center without a lot of cost.

All of BLADE's switches have been certified as interoperable with Cisco and multi-vendor networks.

BLADE’s switch modules for IBM BladeCenter and HP BladeSystem connect blade servers to the rest of the network at 10 Gb Ethernet while reducing cabling and improving reliability, cost, and power.

BLADE’s RackSwitch line of Gigabit and 10Gb Ethernet Top of Rack switches offer best in industry performance along with hardware features ideal for dense data center deployments and managed or unmanaged collocation facilities:

• G8100 and G8124 have been independently verified for 100% line-rate performance and extremely low latency.
• BLADE’s RackSwitch G8000 1/10Gb Ethernet aggregation switch shaves off microseconds of latency at Gigabit Ethernet rates while saving 50% in cost per Gbps compared to a leading competitor.
• Data center optimized airflow: All RackSwitch models support either Front-to-Rear or Rear-to-Front cooling, letting end users choose the switch that has the same airflow as their server and storage devices. Directional airflow reduces the need for extra cooling devices, reduces costs, and improves MTBF—all ideal for placement in collocation facilities. As a result you spend less money cooling your data center compared to switches that cool from side to side or side to rear.
• Low power consumption: an average of nearly $200 savings per year per 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch quickly adds up when your data center scales to hundreds of servers and switches.
• Shorter switch depth (15 inches):allows more room for cables, and makes RackSwitch easy to fit into dense, energy efficient and low cost rack-based solutions like IBM’s iDataPlex.
• Simple redundancy: Uplink Failure Detection provides sub-second failover and a loop-free topology without the complexity and slow convergence time of Spanning Tree protocol.