This video is an excellent introduction to the concepts of cloud computing, virtualization and software as a service. It’s easy to understand why people get them mixed up. Good work rPath.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBd14rjcs0

Yesterday Greg MacSweeney at Wall Street & Technology wrote a story about continued robust spending in low latency spending. This reinforces the trend that we noted here a few weeks ago, that being that algorithmic activity is spreading rapidly from equities to options and FX. From the WS&T article:

Why is it so important in the options market? “Options is the epicenter of market data, with 2 billion messages a day,” McPartland tells WS&T. “There are a lot of people executing high-speed options strategies.” With the Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) recommending that market participants have the capacity to handle nearly 2 million messages a second (10 billion a day) by January 2009, simply handling all of that data is going to require firms to use technology that reduces latency in all parts of the process. (my emphasis)

These kinds of numbers are also behind the increasing interest in hardware solutions for handling the combination of high volume and low-latency. Software is notorious for requiring you to choose one or the other. Hardware middleware gives you both.

Last week I discussed general latency issues that affect all kinds of businesses, but the ultra-low latency space within financial services is its own animal. And it’s a real beast, too…mere microseconds  can cost companies and their clients countless dollars. So you’ll have to excuse the architects tasked with squeezing them out of the system for being downright  pathological about latency.

When people talk about ultra-low latency in financial services, they usually mean front office market data delivery — the elapsed time between a buy or sell occurring and a trading application becoming aware of it.  Here the laundry list of issues boils down to extreme focus on just a few:

Read the rest of this entry »

Further evidence that some people have too much time on their hands. Must be Circuit City warehouses workers

An instant holiday classic for geeks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFquKJ7EKaw

Enjoy the holidays all.

While financial markets have always cared about latency, it’s not a topic often discussed in other industries. This past week, I stumbled across a couple of excellent blog posts on the subject of latency, primarily as related to web and cloud infrastructures.

First Todd Hoff posted on website scalability with his expansive Latency is everywhere and it costs you sales post. Nati Shalom of Gigaspaces built upon that post to include sweeping architectural suggestions from the perspective of a leading data grid provider.

Both are fascinating reads and highlight all the usual sources of latency as well as some that are less obvious. Highly recommended.

There is no one-size-fits-all set of suggestions for dealing with latency, which is why both of these posts are so encyclopedic. The latency hot spots in a web application with 500 milliseconds of latency will be completely different than a 50 millisecond database access application and different still from a market data system with less than 100 microseconds of latency. The same way you wouldn’t use your hammer and drill to fix a watch, you need special precision tools.

I’ll go more into detail on ultra-low latency issues tomorrow.

It’s that time of year again … no not time for year-end shopping or the return of wintery weather. I’m talking about the arrival of 2008 year-end reviews and 2009 predictions.

Ken Hess posted a look ahead at cloud computing in 2009 on the Linux Magazine website and had some sensible suggestions for suppliers and consumers of cloud services. I find it interesting that Solace made his list of 2009 chart toppers, since we haven’t announced our cloud intentions publicly yet, but if he is plugged into the cloud community it’s likely that he knows what we’re up to.

Or maybe it’s as obvious to Ken as it is to us that distributed and virtualized applications require better options to share information between enterprises and the various clouds than are available today. More on these topics shortly…