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

Summit Connectivity Panel – Highlights with Brunner, Malik and Riddoch

Subscribe to our newsletter

Last month’s Low-Latency Summit in New York City featured two morning panels, one on connectivity, the other on computing. Here’s some quotes and highlights from the connectivity panel …

“Folks have pretty much moved from 1 gigabit ethernet to 10 gig, and a lot are moving to 40 gig. Will see more next year” – Cisco’s Dave Malik.

Malik also noted that increasingly, users are looking to get analytics from their infrastructure – buffer usage, queue depth – to proactively manage.

Joe Brunner from Affirmed Systems in a follow up noted that Google is increasingly interested in offerings for the financial markets, has a global network, and is clearly a leader in analytics.

“Queuing delay really messes you up,” said Solarflare Communications’ David Riddoch. When system components cannot keep up, latency can get pushed from microseconds to milliseconds. But buffering to avoid lost packets is usually preferable to dropping them, which would require a re-transmit. With TCP/IP that could mean a 200 millisecond latency bump.

Also commenting on the move from 1 gig to 10 gig ethernet, he noted that for small packet, the higher clock rate of 10gE network adaptors is a big factor – much more than serialisation improvements.

Somewhat astonishingly, Riddoch noted that InfiniBand does indeed still have an edge over 10gE – perhaps by as much as a microsecond per network hop. But this can be achieved only by using RDMA verbs. When comparing socket-level communications, 10gE is faster, he reckoned.

Riddock also commented that RMDA is better at transporting large payloads between servers, than it is at more generalised messaging. And Brunner made the day for Riddock and Malik when he said that “10gE is a thousand times easier to manage than InfiniBand.”

On the downside, though, Brunner noted that large banks and their policy of installing firewalls makes it hard for them to compete with more specialised firms, that have determined they can do without them.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Unlocking value: Harnessing modern data platforms for data integration, advanced investment analytics, visualisation and reporting

4 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Modern data platforms are bringing efficiencies, scalability and powerful new capabilities to institutions and their data pipelines. They are enabling the use of new automation and analytical technologies that are also helping firms to derive more value from their data and...

BLOG

Pico Launches IntelliVUE for Enhanced Network Monitoring and Analytics

Pico, the financial markets technology services, software, data, and analytics provider, has introduced Pico IntelliVUE, an advanced network monitoring and analytics solution for PicoNet, the company’s ultra-low-latency fire-optic network platform. The tool, supported by Pico’s Corvil Analytics technology, integrates multiple data streams into a unified visualisation, delivering actionable insights and detailed performance analytics. IntelliVUE offers...

EVENT

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology London examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

Corporate Actions Europe 2010

The European corporate actions market could be the stage of some pretty heavy duty discussions regarding standards going forward, particularly with regards to the adoption of both XBRL tagging and ISO 20022 messaging. The region’s issuer community, for one, is not going to be easy to convince of the benefits of XBRL tags, given the...