Well, I’ve actually completed a few laps of the exhibits over the past couple of days. There’s no doubt the show was once again smaller than before, but the world of low latency was still pretty well represented. Here are some notes from what I’ve seen …
* Content providers were few and far between. No Thomson Reuters, no Bloomberg, no Interactive Data Corp., no SunGard. But Activ Financial, Exegy, NYSE Technologies were among those who did make it.
* Latency monitoring specialist Endace took the coveted booth 1101 – right at the entrance on the main floor. Apparently, the company was late in signing up, but was able to snag a deal on a great location as Interactive Data had just canceled. George Levine – who was looking on yesterday – resisted an urge to stand in his ‘traditional’ spot on it.
* Speaking of Endace, it was talking about its partnership with Verizon, to provide gap detection technology as an add on to its own functionality.
* Walking into the less-than-popular ‘back hall’ I came across a tangle of connectivity companies that were co-located – Hibernia Atlantic, Hudson Fibre Network, Lightower Fibre Networks, Sidera Networks. Pity anyone who was caught up in that grab for business.
* Mellanox highlighted its new SwitchX switch, which supports both 10gE and InfiniBand networking. Along with its ConnectX network adaptors, and VMA acceleration software (now supporting TCP as well as UDP and multicast), it makes moving between network architectures more straightforward.
* Not to be outdone, Brocade showcased its new VDX 6720, 600 nanosecond, 10gE switch.
* Accelize introduced its ‘smart feed handler’ network interface, complete with FPGA technology to handle TCP offload, and also to run algo trading applications. The company provides a C/C++ compiler for it, free of charge.
* Spectracom presented a range of time synchronisation products. Of note is the TSync-PCIe card, providing 4 nanosecond resolution.
* Fixnetix demonstrated iX-eCute, an FPGA-based trading solution, with end-to-end transaction times as low as 740 nanoseconds. This includes 20+ pre-trade risk checks performed in less than 100 nanoseconds.
* Exegy and CFN Services announced a tie-up to deliver a marketdatapeaks-style website for the Canadian marketplace.
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