About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Cisco Readying New Nexus 3500 Low-Latency Switch

Subscribe to our newsletter

Details are scarce but a mid-September launch for Cisco Systems’ new Nexus 3500 top-of-rack switch is in the cards, a product that will reduce latency significantly compared to its current offerings.

Cisco execs aren’t denying the switch is coming, but neither are they spilling the beans. Press coverage suggests the 3500 will have port-to-port latency of 250 nanoseconds, way faster than the network giant’s current 3064 and 3064-X offerings.

The same coverage also points to a new network interface card (NIC), dubbed unNIC, suggesting that the combination could be pitched as an alternative to InfiniBand. Once, briefly, a champion of InfiniBand, Cisco has for some time thrown its weight behind Ethernet technologies. Meanwhile, Intel has given InfiniBand a boost with its purchase of QLogic’s business in that space.

More certainly, the 3500 will mean a leapfrog for Cisco over rival Arista Networks, which offers the 7124SX with port switching latency of around 500 nanoseconds. Meanwhile, the likes of Gnodal claim sub-150 nanosecond switching for its GS7200, and Zeptonics’ ZeptoMux clocks in at around 130 nanoseconds. Also, Rockflower Networks is in design/concept stage for its RM200GX-10, claiming a less than 100 nanosecond latency.

Of course, latency isn’t the only measure of a switch.  Low jitter, ability to cope with microbursts, buffer analytics, precision time support, layer 3 network protocol support, and management are also factors. As is price. In the future, add to that intelligence, which Arista has a lead in, with its 7124FX, featuring an internal FPGA chip for application logic.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: The challenges and potential of data marketplaces

Data is the lifeblood of capital markets. It is also a valuable commodity providing financial institutions with additional insight when gathered in an internal data marketplace, or packaged and sold externally to other institutions. While the theory is sound, the practice of setting up a data marketplace can be challenging. Internally, vast amounts of data...

BLOG

IEX Group Launches cloudSwXtch, Bringing Multicast to Cloud Networks

IEX Group, through its wholly-owned subsidiary swXtch.io LLC, has announced the commercial launch of cloudSwXtch, a cloud-native software product that aims to bring bare-metal performance capability to the major cloud networks. cloudSwXtch is a virtual overlay network that adds high-performance networking to cloud or edge deployments with no code changes to existing applications. The product...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 12th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in New York brings together the North American, capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore the evolution of data strategy and how to leverage data to drive compliance and business insight.

GUIDE

Tackling the Data Management Challenges of FATCA

As the July 1, 2014 deadline for compliance with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act – or FATCA – approaches, financial institutions around the world are working to ensure their data management and operational systems will meet the requirements of the US legislation. This report discusses the requirements of FATCA and how the legislation is...