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

Intel Expands Networking Clout with QLogic Buy … But What Impact on Trading Systems?

Subscribe to our newsletter

Intel’s planned acquisition of QLogic’s InfiniBand business – announced last week – further advances its general ‘world domination’ plans in networking. And while its aspirations go way beyond low-latency trading, expect a trickle down that will over time impact how automated trading systems are implemented.

QLogic’s InfiniBand offerings – shortly to be owned by Intel – include switches and network cards, based on its own TrueScale silicon. It’s a product line that will “bring increased options and exceptional value to our data centre customers,” says an Intel executive.

Don’t expect much near-term impact on systems deployed in the financial markets, since QLogic was hardly a player in the vertical where InfiniBand and Mellanox Technologies are synonymous.

Longer term, though, Intel’s continuing push into networking will likely affect not only how data centres in general are built, but technology choices for those implementing low-latency architectures for financial trading.

That push began in 2008 with the acquisition of NetEffect, which used previous InfiniBand experience to implement Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) protocols in 10 gigabit Ethernet network adaptors.

Last year, it snapped up Fulcrum Microsystems, which develops Ethernet silicon that is found in switches from the likes of Arista Networks and IBM System Networking (Blade Network Technologies as was).

Now it has InfiniBand technology to go along with its strong Ethernet lineup. More significantly, its technology leadership credentials are strong enough to heavily influence technology directions in the financial markets.

While Ethernet technology is approaching the performance of InfiniBand in terms of latency and jitter, the general school of thought is that InfiniBand still has the edge, though it comes with implementation and management baggage. With Intel’s muscle behind Fulcrum’s core technology, further improvements in latency/jitter are very likely, as is packaging of compute and network processing on a single chip.

It will be interesting to see how Intel slices up the networking pie between Ethernet and InfiniBand. One might reasonably surmise that it will continue to push Ethernet in the financial markets, and direct InfiniBand to HPC applications, and leverage it for its many-core processor developments.

It will also be worth watching whether this acquisition also pushes Mellanox into a similar corporate event, as it faces increased competition in its general markets. Some have suggested that Oracle might make a pitch, since it uses Mellanox’s InfiniBand technology in several of its appliance products (including those tuned to run Java for financial trading). Oracle also has an 8.7% stake in Mellanox.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: MiFID II – How prepared are we?

With the compliance deadline for Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) just over six months away on 3 January 2018, how ready are market practitioners to meet the challenges and obligations of the regulation? This webinar will identify outstanding challenges and how they can be approached, discuss how practitioners are sourcing required –...

BLOG

TNS Bolsters Global Presence with Acquisition of BornTec’s Managed Hosting and Colocation Services

Transaction Network Services (TNS), provider of mission-critical infrastructure, connectivity, market data and analytic services for the Financial Markets community, has announced the acquisition of the managed hosting and colocation business of BornTec, a real-time data analytics provider. The deal further expands TNS’s global connectivity footprint and builds on previous strategic acquisitions, including R2G and NetExpress....

EVENT

Institutional Digital Assets Briefing, New York

TradingTech Insight Briefing New York will explore how trading firms are innovating and leveraging technology as a differentiator in today’s cloud and digital based environment.

GUIDE

ESG Data Handbook 2022

The ESG landscape is changing faster than anyone could have imagined even five years ago. With tens of trillions of dollars expected to have been committed to sustainable assets by the end of the decade, it’s never been more important for financial institutions of all sizes to stay abreast of changes in the ESG data...