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

LDA Technologies Launches NeoTap X and Neo X Timestamping and Tap Aggregation Solutions

LDA Technologies, the provider of ultra-low latency networking and FPGA technology, has introduced NeoTap X, a high-performance timestamping and tap aggregation solution designed to address the increasing data and compliance demands of capital markets. The new product is built on LDA’s Neo X FPGA platform, offering enhanced processing power and optimised resource efficiency for low-latency...

EVENT

Data Licensing Forum 2025

The Data Licensing Forum will explore industry trends, themes and specific developments relating to licensing of financial market data from Exchanges and Data Vendors.

GUIDE

The Global LEI System – Slow but Sure

After what looked like a slow start to the summer, the initiative to establish a global standard for legal entity identifiers (LEIs) took a series of significant leaps forward during August, that appears to have put the project firmly back on track. If the marketplace felt a little reticent in June and July, it could...