Solarflare & Solace Offer Mutual Customers Strong Foundation

Solarflare (News - Alert) Communications, a provider of high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions, has entered into a partnership relation with Solace Systems (News - Alert), the premier provider of hardware-based middleware, to ensure and facilitate the success of customers using the two companies' products.

To show the ultra-low latency performance that can be achieved using technology from Solace and Solarflare over a 10GbE network, test results were published. With this alliance, the working of Solarflare and Solace to deliver robust, high-throughput, low-latency messaging to financial services and high-performance computing firms, will be formalized.

The tests, through a Solace high-speed message router, measured the latency of market data being routed between publishers and subscribers, each using Solarflare Solarstorm 10GbE SFP+ server adapters and Enterprise OpenOnload kernel bypass software.

The platform, when handling 1,000,000 market data messages per second, exhibited very low latency and jitter -- an average latency of just 24 microseconds and a 99.9th percentile latency of 29 microseconds.

Even at much higher rates, latency remained low and consistent. For instance, at 5,000,000 market data messages per second, average latency was 35 microseconds and 99.9th percentile latency was 46 microseconds.

“For successful electronic trading, consistent latency is as or more important than absolute latency,” said Shawn McAllister, chief technology officer at Solace Systems. “With Solarflare's Solarstorm adapter capabilities and OpenOnload kernel bypass, variability in software jitter is minimized and, when combined with message filtering and fanout in hardware, it provides a highly predictable system -- even in the face of extreme market peaks.”

Various tests were performed with standard product configurations; customers can expect to reproduce these results with the same equipment and configurations.

“The combination of Solace and Solarflare gives our mutual customers a strong foundation for any high-performance, low-latency trading operation,” said Bruce Tolley, vice president, corporate and financial services vertical marketing at Solarflare Communications. “We are committed to help high frequency and algorithmic trading firms build fast and predictable market data environments with our low-latency, high-performance 10GbE solutions.”

In related news, Solarflare Communications has announced the general availability of the newest additions to its family of branded 10GbE products that includes the Solarstorm SFN5122F 10GbE dual-port server adapter and Enterprise OpenOnload.