Voltaire and NYSE Technologies have developed a joint market data messaging solution that the companies say is the first to run at 40 gigabits per second. Not only is this four times faster than 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based fabrics, the companies say, but it also promises low power consumption.
Although much of Wall Street and the IT world in general is gravitating toward 10 gigabit Ethernet as a standard for networking and storage, "Infiniband is and will continue to be the highest performing networking technology out there," says Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire (which also has 10 gigabit Ethernet products). "Nothing else comes close."
Voltaire's 40 gigabit Infiniband switches consume less than six watts per port, according to the company. Somekh says this is simply due to the low-power nature of Infiniband. "Infiniband makes the assumption that we're running in a data center environment, therefore the hardware has been simplified, with fewer elements," Somekh says.
The two companies say their joint product will deliver more than one million messages per second at 10 microsecond latency. It's composed of NYSE Technologies' Data Fabric high performance middleware, Voltaire Grid Director 40 Gb/s QDR InfiniBand switches and host channel adapters and Voltaire Messaging Software. The benchmark environment at which the companies achieved these results used servers based on the new Nehalem Intel Xeon Processor 5500.
