Emerging Technologies That Will Change the Data Center

Three emerging technologies that will make Wall Street data centers more efficient in the coming year.

A chief technology architect at a large bulge-bracket firm (who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak with WS&T on the record) calls solid-state drives, remote direct memory access (RDMA) and ultra-multicore servers "game changers." These three emerging technologies, he says, are sure to make Wall Street data centers more efficient in the coming year.

Solid-State Drives

WHAT THEY ARE: Data storage devices that use solid-state memory (meaning they contain no mechanical parts) to store persistent data. They emulate hard disk drives and can seamlessly work with most applications.

WHY THEY'RE GOOD: "Because latency is such a huge issue, Wall Street firms have explored solid-state technology a lot," says Bernard Golden, CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus. "It's a way of avoiding the time delays imposed by spinning disks holding large amounts of data."

Adds technology consultant Neal Nelson, "The idea is to attack the disk bottleneck. The CPU is not the bottleneck anymore; the disk subsystem is."

CRITICS SAY: Solid-state drives lack data center features, such as hot-swappability and high-performance writing.

WHO PROVIDES THEM: IBM, HP, Sun, Intel, Texas Memory Systems

WHO'S USING IT ALREADY: Trading firm Fox River Financial Resources

Ultra-Multicore Servers

WHAT THEY ARE: x86 servers with many processors inside. Nehalem EX servers with four sockets and 64 cores will be available by the end of the year, according to Intel. Advanced Micro Devices plans to release a 12-core server chip in 2010 and is designing an Opteron 6000 chip with up to 16 cores -- which, in a four-socket server, would provide 64 cores -- that will be released in 2011.

WHY THEY'RE GOOD: These standard servers can be applied to high-performance computing problems (with some rewriting of application code for parallelization), thereby jettisoning the need to buy costly specialized machines. They also can be applied more simply to virtualization, meaning that firms can get away with buying fewer servers.

CRITICS SAY: Multicore servers are an unstoppable force of nature. But in the past they've been criticized for memory issues that keep them from performing optimally. Intel and AMD both say they have addressed these issues.

WHO PROVIDES THEM: IBM, Dell, HP, Sun

WHO'S USING IT ALREADY: Many firms are using 16- and 24-core servers. Buttonwood Group Trading uses 24-core Dell servers.

RDMA Over 10 Gigabit Ethernet

WHAT IT IS: Remote direct memory access, or RDMA, allows data to move directly from the memory of one computer into that of another without involving the operating system, allowing high-throughput, low-latency networking. RDMA over 10 gigabit Ethernet in a data center typically involves using 10 gigabit Ethernet networking technology to provide both storage and networking interconnections, promising savings through consolidation.

WHY IT'S GOOD: "RDMA is one of the technologies we use to reduce latency to a small number of microseconds at a very high throughput rate," says Stanley Young, co-global CIO of NYSE Euronext.

CRITICS SAY: Standardization is needed to make this technology work as a universal data center fabric. Ten gigabit Ethernet is relatively new and there isn't much market penetration.

WHO PROVIDES IT: NetXen, Chelsio, Mellanox

WHO'S USING IT ALREADY: New York Stock Exchange