Solarflare Announces Result of Multi-Vendor Benchmark Test

Solarflare has announced the results of a recently completed multi-vendor benchmark test with IBM.

With the help of STAC-M2 Benchmark, vendors measured the messaging performance of the solution stack. The company said that it was selected as the preferred 10GbE server adapter.

The mean latency of the solution used standard Ethernet and UDP (News - Alert) protocols, and did not exceed 10 microseconds, said company officials. And, the standard deviation of the latency was measured at zero microseconds.

Company officials said that the mean latency of the solution was just 14 microseconds at the highest tested rate of 2.3 million messages/second, and the standard deviation of latency was measured at 2 microseconds.

For IT managers and Linux engineers who are building high-frequency trading systems, these results are considered quite significant since they show that a low-latency, highly-deterministic system that achieves near zero jitter can be built with standard, off-the-shelf Ethernet and IP network equipment, according to company officials.

“We continue to look for opportunities to participate in STAC M2 Benchmark tests, so our customers can make informed decisions and build solutions with best-of-class elements, like Solarflare’s (News - Alert) 10GbE adapters and IBM messaging middleware, switches and servers,” said Bruce Tolley, vice president of solutions and outbound marketing at Solarflare.

Company officials said that Solarflare’s OpenOnload allows customers to get access to all the necessary Layer 2 and Layer 3 features, including virtual LAN trunking for the management, separation and security of IP traffic flows; link aggregation for failover and redundancy; address resolution protocol (ARP) caching for high-speed mapping of Ethernet to IP addresses; and Internet control message protocol (ICMP) notifications for network diagnostics and resiliency.

Solarflare’s middleware provides true transparency to POSIX sockets. Company officials said that this helps designers of high-performance networks and they do not need to rewrite their applications to get the performance increase that the software provides.

The company’s solution, transparently, supports the Linux networking functions required by high-frequency trading applications – poll, select, epoll, fork, exec, signals and comprehensive socket flags, said company officials.

The tests were audited by the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC). The tested solution under test consisted of Solarflare SFN5122F 10GbE adapters with OpenOnload application acceleration middleware; IBM (News - Alert) WMQ Low Latency Messaging v2.4.0.2; Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 5.5; 2x Quad-Core Intel (News - Alert) Xeon X5570 2.93 GHz;  IBM x3550 M2 Model Servers; and IBM-BNT G8264 10Gb/40Gb Ethernet switch

Recently, Solarflare Communications announced that it raised $20.49 million out of planned $24.14 million through private equity offering.

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