Content about Servers, Storage & Systems Software

At the Open Compute Summit, AMD – a member of Open Compute and a leader in driving open standards -- today unveiled a flexible and innovative Open Compute Project server platform specification, codenamed “Roadrunner,” to enable power-efficient, cost-effective solutions. “Roadrunner” is specifically designed to meet the general purpose compute, cloud infrastructure, high-performance compute and storage needs of the financial services industry. This move is in line with the Open Compute Project’s mission of driving further innovation and greater energy efficiency in infrastructure technology.

Azul Systems, the award-winning leader in Java runtime scalability, announced today that it has signed an OEM agreement with Chicago, IL-based OptionsCity Software, a financial technology company that provides real-time electronic trading solutions on the world's leading derivatives markets. OptionsCity will integrate Azul's Zing into Freeway, its server-based, multi-asset algorithmic trading platform, as well as Metro, its fully-configurable, high-performance market making and electronic trading platform. This agreement aligns with OptionsCity's goal to deliver the lowest latency across its trading platforms, which recently broke the 100 micro-second barrier for round trip execution.

This white paper was written by Hardcore Computer.

A millisecond delay can mean the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars for algorithmic traders engaged in high frequency trading (HFT) in today's financial markets. To gain that valuable competitive edge, financial institutions require high-performance computing solutions that are fast, reliable and offer low latency.

But performance demands are pushing the physical boundaries of conventional computing equipment – from the desktop and workstation to the server. While today's processors are faster and better, they still are negatively impacted by the heat generated when overclocked, and how to cool equipment is still a fundamental challenge.

Read how Hardcore Computer and its patented total liquid submersion cooling technology is facing the challenge head on. As the first company to use this unique cooling method, Hardcore Computer is helping the financial services industry achieve significant improvements in computing speed, performance, reliability and latency minimization, while reducing cooling and power costs and lessening environmental impact.

With just a week to go before the London Low-Latency Summit, I thought it was the right time to preview what the agenda will bring.  Space at the new venue - the America Square Conference Centre - is limited but there's room for a few more delegates, so be sure to register today. Now, with the public service announcement/commercial over ...

So, in the wake of NYSE Euronext's failed merger with Deutsche Borse, executives at the exchange group are clearly embarking on a Plan B. Part of that is the deal it announced on February 16, which will see it take a 25% stake in Fixnetix, a provider of co-located, managed services for low-latency market data, market access and pre-trade risk management. The "strategic investment" - which allows for a complete acquisition down the road - will see the two collaborate to offer their respective services on a global basis.

As financial markets firms face the challenge of managing huge volumes of extremely high frequency data, the opportunity exists to transition from just managing this data to strategically leveraging it for new trading and investment opportunities.

What was once the impossible is now a reality - and via this webinar, Dell, Kove, Kx Systems and Intel will demonstrate how their joint solution provides new options and opportunities for analyzing and leveraging 'Big Data' for profit in ways that were not previously possible. Participants include:

* Pete Harris, Editor, Low-Latency.com (Moderator)
* Daryan Dehghanpisheh, Global Director, Financial Services & Institutions, Intel
* Simon Garland, Chief Strategist, Kx Systems
* Mark King, Global Strategy & Business Development Director, Banking & Securities Vertical, Dell
* John Overton, CEO, Kove

Register to Attend this 45-Minute Webinar
(opens a new window on the GoToWebinar website)

By Steve Graves, Co-Founder and CEO, McObject
www.mcobject.com/extremedbfamily.shtml

In the realm of real-time database systems, DRAM memory is the new storage. Technologists have long recognised that grabbing data from main memory is much quicker than accessing it from I/O-based persistent media (disk, flash, etc.). This is the rationale for database management system (DBMS) caching mechanisms, which seek to predict which records will be requested, and hold this data in memory.

The RamSan-720 offers 12 TB of Flash capacity, 5 GB/s of bandwidth, and no single point of failure. Its proprietary 2D Flash RAID™ technology delivers a new level of High Availability and data protection for mission-critical data sets. Texas Memory Systems, Inc., provider of The World's Fastest Storage®, has once again raised the bar for feature-rich Flash storage with its new RamSan-720 system. It provides high capacity, extreme performance, and high availability with no single point of failure. It operates at very low power levels that users demand, but usually cannot get, in a single 1U system.

A recent performance benchmark conducted by Citihub resulted in a lot of talk about "overclocking" of CPUs, and what the driver for it is. Low-Latency.com asked Chad Attlesey, CTO of overclocking leader Hardcore Computer, to explain what it's all about, how to overclock reliably, and what performance gains might be seen.

Azul Systems has released version 5.0 of its Zing realtime Java Virtual Machine for Linux, eliminating the need for a hypervisor layer, and thus making it more attractive to developers of low-latency trading applications. In earlier versions, the required hypervisor virtualisation added unwelcome latency.

Trading technology consulting firm Citihub has released highlights of performance testing it completed on Tibco Software's FTL middleware running on Hardware Computer's over-clocked, liquid-cooled Detonator workstation. Not surprisingly, the results are the fastest seen to date for inter-process communication.

"I think the Calxeda-ARM machine is an exciting step ... I'm evaluating carefully how it can impact the metrics I care about," says Niall Dalton, director of high frequency trading at Cantor Fitzgerald. He is referring to today's announcement by Calxeda of their very low power microprocessors based on the ARM architecture - and HP's plan to build servers based on them.