Cisco Delivers First End-to-End High-Performance Trading Fabric

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 14, 2011) - Today, financial firms need to execute trades and transactions with the highest performance while rapidly processing more and more complex information. Delays to transactions of fractions of seconds can generate or cost millions of dollars and the most successful firms seek out the highest performing IT systems to gain or maintain competitive advantage. To help them achieve this advantage, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced the first high-performance trading fabric completely optimized for the financial markets industry.

The Cisco® high-performance trading fabric unifies data center switching, storage and compute technologies into a single system which helps enhance data center network performance at each step of an automated trade. The high-performance trading fabric is based on Cisco's holistic data center fabric approach that includes the recently announced Cisco Nexus 3064 and Nexus 5500 data center switches designed to sustain peaks of traffic without loss, while also delivering industry leading ultra-low latency performance. Cisco's architectural approach is designed to deliver differentiated business value.

Cisco has commissioned exhaustive tests, going beyond typical Request for Comments (RFC), to measure the impact of intense traffic scenarios, such as microbursts, on network performance. Performance testing by Miercom, a network consultancy specializing in networking and communications-related product testing and analysis, showed that Cisco's switches performed better than products from Arista or BNT in terms of low-latency and low jitter, two key factors which impact the performance of trading systems overall. The report also highlights significant differences in software features available with the Cisco solution, including Layer 2, Layer 3, infrastructure and management features -- many required to optimize a high-performance trading fabric. In fact, the report highlights that many of these critical features are only available with the Cisco solution. The test report can be downloaded at www.miercom.com/cisco.

The Cisco High-Performance Trading Fabric provides:

• Proven low-latency and reliability supported by the most rigorous, real-world testing in the industry
• The capability to handle extremely volatile periods of market activity without loss -- for instance, at market open and close or when mid-day opportunities generate intense surges of trading activity
• A scalable and flexible architecture with predictable low-latency performance (submicrosecond on all ports), that adjusts to meet business requirements including no packet loss during bursts of traffic
• Critical relationships with the best partners to deliver real-world results in the low-latency market data delivery value chain
• Security features unmatched within other systems and switches, including ingresss VACL and forthcoming PVLAN

Supporting Quotes

Paul Jameson, Global Director for Financial Services Industry, Cisco
"This announcement underscores Cisco's commitment to the switching market in the most challenging industry in the world, financial markets," said Paul Jameson, Cisco global director for the financial services industry. "In the mid-'80s, Cisco put automated trading on the map, and with the announcement of our no compromise, High-Performance Trading Fabric, Cisco is taking automated trading to the next level. We demonstrate industry leadership in every area critical to high-performance trading and have the highest performance and reliability statistics based on real-world testing."

Victor Kokaram, Head of Infrastructure at Mantara
"Leveraging the latest technology advancements is among our core tenets. Selecting the Cisco Nexus 3064 Switch was an obvious choice as our top-of-rack solution to take advantage of its 64-port 10Gbps density. Its ultra-low-latency switching with robust layer-3 unicast and multicast routing features delivers the performance required by our most latency-sensitive clients, while maintaining upstream consistency with our Nexus 7000 core switches.

"We are managing a significant growth in clients who are selecting us to provide ULL solutions in all of the major US data centers. As a result, we are looking for a provider that not only meets our performance requirements, but also offers a rich layer of functionality -- such as private VLAN security without any latency penalty. Once again, Cisco has demonstrated their leadership."

Rob Smithers, CEO, Miercom
"Cisco continues to underscore their dedication to this highly competitive space by developing not just each specific technology element required for HFT, but with each component optimized and tested against the real-world challenges financial markets face on a daily basis. Their latest foray, with the Nexus 3064 switch is the perfect example of these achievements. Excellently designed and formatted to process against microbursts and jitter while maintaining performance at 100 percent throughout, Cisco is definitely proven superior in competitive testing."

Technology Partner Support

• Solace message routers
• 29West (now part of Informatica) Latency Busters Messaging middleware
• Thomson Reuters Market Data System (RMDS)
• NYSE Technologies Data Fabric
• Corvil CorvilNet for latency monitoring and microburst detection
• Network adapters from Intel, Solarflare, and Chelsio

SUPPORTING RESOURCES

• Read more on Cisco Algo Speed HFT Solution Overview
• Read more on High-Performance Automated Trading Network Architecture
• View printable High-Performance Trading Architecture Poster
• View videos on Cisco's new data center products and the Data Center Business Advantage
• Read Cisco Financial Markets website
• Read Cisco Unified Fabric website
• Read Cisco Data Center website
• Read Cisco Financial Services blog

Technorati Tags: Cisco, Financial Services, Data Center, Data Center Switches, Financial Markets, Unified Fabric

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