The 2015 HPC for Wall Street – Cloud Technology Show and Conference event saw Juniper Networks bring new offerings for “the street” with the unveiling of the QFX5100-AA switch with optional QFX-PFA packet flow accelerator (PFA).
The PFA is based on Altera’s multi-100G FPGA. The FPGA enables developers to write applications that can now be run directly on the switch. Unlike most Juniper products that are made for broad adoption, this product is designed for high-performance environments that need to scale out rapidly. While financial services is not the only vertical that can benefit for the QFX5100-AA, it is certainly the most obvious one.
Competition
Ryan Eavy, executive director of Architecture for the CME Group is of the opinion that it is clear that it is getting much harder to compete in the financial vertical. One of the reasons is the obvious fact that bandwidth needs keep growing. There are so many electronic trading systems today that order volume has gone through the roof. Eavy displayed a chart during his presentation that showed that in 2010, the network saw about 2.6 million orders on a daily basis. Today, just five years later, this number has jumped to 30 to 40 million per day. This has a multiplicative problem as well, in that each message is then broadcast out to a number of different service providers so each additional order creates multiple new messages to cross the network.
The other challenge in financial services is that it becomes harder to make money because of the shrinking spreads on trades. Previously in this vertical, it was not uncommon to see financial services firms make a dime or more per share, per trade. Today, this has been cut down to pennies or even fractions of pennies, meaning firms have to do an order of magnitude more trades to make the same money they did just a few year ago. The theme of “do more with less” has never been truer than it is today in financial services.
Environment simplification
One of the big initiatives for the CME is to try and simplify the environment. The increased complexity of IT has been well documented, both in the press and at these events. Converged infrastructure, such as the Juniper QFX5100-AA, makes it easier to shift to a distributed compute model without having to deploy racks of infrastructure everywhere. Additionally, it makes managing fault tolerance easier. At the CME, if there is a problem with a system, the whole environment is failed over a redundant one so a converged network-server platform means less infrastructure, less complexity, and easier-to-manage failover.
Also, the embedded compute node on the switch means that workloads and processing of information can be pushed out closer to the edge. In the case of order flow, Eavy said that the CME would use the Juniper switches to change the way it handles inbound and outbound messages. Instead of having to run everything into the core, more processing can be done at the edge and then traffic distributed from that point, eliminating much of the traffic that traverses the network today.
Partnership
Juniper partnered with Maxeler Technologies to enable users to create custom features and to do analytics on the data that crosses the network. Andy Bach, chief architect, Financial Services Vertical, Juniper, said that one of the reasons they liked Maxeler so much is that the interface is very “Java-like,” so developers do not have to be scripting and CLI experts. The familiarity of the programming language should help Juniper customers rapidly build applications or features that reside on the compute node embedded in the switch. An example of this is developing an analytic engine that can parse social media feeds to more accurately automate trades. So much of our news today is distributed over Twitter and other platforms first that it has being increasingly important to take all of these feeds in, quickly parse the data, analyse it, and take action. Now this can be done directly on the switch.
As far as the switch goes, it is built on Broadcom’s Trident II switch and offers lots of 40-Gig ports. The solid-state disks, FPGA, and the dataflow programming language enabled by Maxeler makes the QFX5100-AA one of the most unique products to be introduced into the financial services vertical in years. Simplification is key, but not at the expense of innovation. The new Juniper switch appeals to the need for networks to be easy both to deploy and manage.
Zeus Kerravala, IDG News Service
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