Solarflare, Cloudsoft, Citrix Partner to Build High-Speed Clouds

A view shared by some on Wall Street is that cloud computing is fine for latency-insensitive purposes such as application testing, but that it's not well suited to high-performance applications such as trading. But high-performance cloud options are starting to emerge, such as the announcement today by Solarflare, Cloudsoft and Citrix of a joint cloud networking solution.

The companies say they have benchmarked Monterey, Cloudsoft's cloud platform, running over Solarflare adapters and switches with Citrix XenServer server virtualization software. They claim they have achieved a data transmission speed of 4.6 Gbps on multiple, respective, guest-to-guest links. With four pairs of guest-to-guest links, the test achieved 18.5 Gbps bi-directional line rate on a 10G physical connection. The vendors say this represents a five- to six-fold improvement over other server virtualization I/O solutions available on the market.

This proof-of-concept testing is part of a phased rollout of Monterey, which launched in September. Monterey provides native support for Cloudsoft Distributed Mediation, a middleware platform that is said to simplify the development and deployment of complex transactional applications in the cloud. Cloudsoft's technology is designed to eliminate network and processing bottlenecks and implement policies such as follow-the-sun to minimize latency and follow-the-moon to compress costs.

The test configuration included these elements: Citrix XenServer 5.5, Intel Xeon 5570 processors, Super Micro 2U Twin^2 chassis, Arista Networks 7148SX 48 Port 10GbE switch, and Solarflare Solarstorm SFN4112F 10GbE server adapters.