Networking firm Cisco has introduced Nexus 3548 switch which is comes integrated with the Algo Boost technology in a compact 1-rack-unit (1RU) to offer enhanced performance, visibility and control.
The company claimed that the new switch is suitable for high performance computing, high performance trading, and big data environments.
Cisco Nexus 3548 with Algo Boost claims to deliver up to 60% network-access performance improvement over competing full-featured 10 Gigabit (GB) Ethernet switches.
It offers a network-access performance as low as 190 nanoseconds (ns) in in "warp mode" with small to medium Layer 2 and Layer 3 scaling requirements, the company said.
The new ultra-low-latency switch enhances the Cisco High Performance Trading Fabric architecture that enables enhanced business agility and intelligence for customers, while eliminating performance or latency penalties.
The Nexus 3548 provides the efficient delivery of stock market data to financial trading servers in 50 ns with the warp switch port analyzer (SPAN) feature.
It also includes Hitless Network Address Translation (NAT), which allows algorithmic traders to connect to any trading venue they desire without any latency penalty.
Spirent TestCenter verifies the Nexus 3548 switch latency speeds across various workloads by using testing specifications developed jointly with Spirent Communications.
Cisco Data Center Group senior vice president David Yen said Nexus 3548 with the Cisco Algo Boost technology implemented in ASIC provides a feature set to give financial traders control over their trading algorithms and respond to the changes in the market.
"In addition to the performance, this unique ultra-low-latency Ethernet technology is part of the unified data center fabric and offers strong total cost of ownership for commercial high-performance computing and big data environments as well as scale-out storage topologies," said Yen.
The Nexus 3548 switch integrates Cisco Algo Boost technology in the ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) switching silicon that provides visibility into how the switch is performing while in production.
Precision Time Protocol helps trading firms keep their infrastructure synchronized, allow them to correlate network events and achieve regulatory compliance, digital forensics, while Active Buffer Monitoring monitors, alerts users to congestion points that could be occurring and may negatively impact application performance.
With Intelligent Traffic Mirroring, traders gain visibility into why gapping, slippage and slow order situations occur, correlating these trends with analytics tools to enable trading decisions.
