NYSE, Voltaire Roll Out 10 Gig E Data Fabric

New data fabric for market data applications said to achieve 25 microsecond average latencies at one million messages per second.

Three weeks after announcing a joint 40-gigabit Infiniband networking solution for market data, NYSE Technologies and Voltaire today are rolling out a 10-gigabit Ethernet solution, a combination of NYSE Technologies' Data Fabric technology and Voltaire's Vantage 8500 switch and VMS message acceleration software. The new data fabric is said to achieve average latencies of 25 microseconds at rates of 1 million 200 byte messages per second per core for messaging applications.

Where do they see Wall Street gravitating toward one type of messaging network versus the other? "Infiniband is the clear leader when it comes to price performance, the 40 gigabit solution is list priced around $12,000," about a third of what some 10 gigabit Ethernet solutions cost, notes Yaron Haviv, CTO of Voltaire. Smaller firms that have not invested heavily in Ethernet technologies tend to be buyers of Infiniband on Wall Street. Because of the density of ports it uses, 40-gigabit Infiniband is more power friendly than 10-gigabit Ethernet products. It obviously offers four times the bandwidth and performance; according to IEEE, 40 gigabit Ethernet won't be available until 2014.

Yet, "from our perspective, certain demographics won't look at infiniband for certain reasons," notes Conor Allen, head of R&D at NYSE Technologies. For instance, those interested in cloud computing gravitate toward the more standard 10 gigabit Ethernet.

The two vendors claim their new 10 gig Ethernet solution will deliver 50% lower latency than competitive solutions based on 10 Gig E. They say this is because of joint work they've done on streamlining software transports and providing Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which allows data to move directly from the memory of one computer into that of another without involving either one's operating system.

"From our perspective, RDMA is critical, and this is all about taking the power of RDMA and putting it in the hands of your developers through an industry standard API," Allen says.