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 is designed to offer the network features required for demanding, high-throughput workflows, including multicast, broadcast, packet monitoring, and protocol conversion & fanout.
This marks the latest in a series of initiatives from various parties to bring multicast to the cloud, with both Colt and CJC recently running successful proofs of concept.
IEX appears to have taken things a step beyond the PoC stage by formally launching cloudSwXtch, which enables multicast along with other mission-critical capabilities such as ground-to-cloud bridging, protocol translation & fanout, and network path redundancy to all the major cloud service providers.
“We designed cloudSwXtch specifically to look like bare metal networks, so it doesn’t require you to change your code,” says Brent Yates, CTO of SwXtch. “We just slide it over the top of a standard cloud network and to give you more control, add another little piece of software that sits inside the kernel – either Windows or Linux – which is transparent to your software.”
cloudSwXtch is likely to be particularly beneficial for firms looking to monetise market data, suggests Yates. “Until now, people have had to do a cross-connect in the data centre to distribute market data, but being able to push it into the cloud for near-real time or offline processing makes it very easy for you to monetise that output, because you can spin up a Kubernetes cluster and process financial data in any of the clouds if the data is already sitting there.”
Yates goes on to highlight how cloudSwXtch helps firms as they undergo digital transformation programs. “As they keep some workloads in their bare metal networks and move others to the cloud, we provide the bridging from bare metal into the cloud for multicast data. Whether the multicast is on bare metal or in the cloud, it’s the same network, we take care of all the tunnelling and security, and it’s bi-directional.”
cloudSwXtch is now commercially available through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. The Company intends to add support for additional cloud platforms soon, including Amazon Web Services, Google and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Subscribe to our newsletter
