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The goal is millions of transactions in real time. Not an easy feat without a new class of networking gear and new architectures. It is changing and challenging traditional constructs for High Frequency Trading (HFT) markets. It creates an insatiable appetite to shave every nanosecond of latency to overcome a long-standing barrier that has existed for fair and equitable trading.
In High frequency trading (HFT) the least possible round trip delay is a key metric. So reducing every component of latency at every step of the transaction is mandatory. The key contributors to latency include the network, market data feed, the ticker plant, the messaging platform, and the server as shown below in the diagram. An aggregate sum can be as high as 100 microseconds in latency, but as compute and applications become faster, end-to-end latency window is expected to less than 31 microseconds. This makes traditional networking the big bottleneck. Traditional Ethernet switches contribute 10 to 50 microseconds or 50+% of the latency and often the latency is unpredictable with wide variations of jitter and multicast leakage.
A veritable arms race is underway in the financial markets. A new breed of financial and technology providers are vying to offer the lowest possible latency in the delivery of market data and trade execution. Adoption of well-designed low latency 1/ 10 Gigabit Ethernet is key for such low latency. The Arista 7100 is ideally suited delivering latency as low as 600 nanoseconds with reliable multicast support and uniform behaviour under load and packet sizes. We are proud to be validated independently as the #1 Clear Choice winner in a recent Network World 10GbE data center test. In the past Infiniband was considered the only option to this type of ultra low latency. Not anymore. Since market data feeds are Ethernet-based, you can avoid the delay and latency required to convert to InfiniBand with gateways by choosing well-designed low latency Arista1/10GbE networking.
At Arista, we understand the perils of poor network designs and products in this financial sector. We have partnered with leading NIC providers and financial application vendors to deploy high frequency trading solutions for customers worldwide.
Welcome to the new era and decade of low latency 10GbE cloud networking. As always I welcome your comments at feedback@aristanetworks.com
