An interesting post on the Datacenter Knowledge site about the growth in low latency data centers, the two things that were pretting shocking to me at the end were:
“I still find it amazing,†said McPartland. “A blink of an eye is 300 milliseconds. That’s an eternity in this business.â€
How much of an eternity: “You can do a heck of a lot in 2 microseconds,†said Kaplan.
Interesting the latency requirements these fast stock traders are looking for, reminded me of a network upgrade the NYSE did deploying some Juniper stuff a while back as reported by The Register:
With the NewYork Stock Exchange down on Wall Street being about ten miles away from the data center in New Jersey, the delay between Wall Street and the systems behind the NYSE is about 105 microseconds. This is not a big deal for some trading companies, but means millions of dollars for others.
[..]
NYSE Technologies, which is the part of the company that actually hooks people into the NYSE and Euronext exchanges, has rolled out a market data system based on the Vantage 8500 switches. The system offers latencies per core switch in the range of 25 microseconds for one million messages per second on messages that are 200 bytes in size.
The Vantage 8500 switch seems pretty scalable, claiming to have non blocking scalability of 10GbE for up to 3,400 servers, announced last year.
Arista Networks somewhat recently launched an initiative aimed at this market segment as well.
Since the Juniper announcement, Force10 announced that the NYSE has chosen their gear for the next generation data centers at the NYSE, the Juniper switching gear so far hasn’t looked all that great compared to the competition, so I’d be curious how the deployment of Force10 stuff relates to the earlier deployment of Juniper stuff:
SAN JOSE, Calif., November 9, 2009 – Force10 Networks, Inc., the global technology leader that data center, service provider and enterprise customers rely on when the network is their business, today announced that the NYSE Euronext has selected its high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) core and access switches to power the management network in their next-generation data centers in the greater New Jersey and London metro areas.
Force10 of course has been one of the early innovators and leaders in 10GbE port density and raw throughput(at least on paper, I’ve never used their stuff personally though have heard good things). On a related note it wasn’t long ago that they filed for an IPO, I wish them the best, as Force10 really is an innovative company and I’ve admired their technology for several years now.
(how do I remember all of these news articles?)