Tervela Message Medium Blog | August 2008

A recent article by Fayazuddin Shiraz in Chief Executive turned me onto a post by Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, lauding the company’s recent announcement of 1 million messages per second for RMDS (Reuters Market Data System). Congratulations to Sun and Intel on the worthwhile collaboration. There is, however, an interesting implication: what happens to the network when you source such a vast amount of market data to a large number of very hungry electronic consumers? (Who may, of course, generate derivative traffic.) Rhetorical question perhaps, but this volume of messaging data can destroy even the most well-provisioned infrastructure regardless of the bandwidth ceiling.

Some time ago (in the pre-steroids era), we had message traffic flowing on a separate network. It was the right thing to do. Later, that network was collapsed into the “new and improved” high performance switched infrastructure. All the data lived happily together for a while – until message volumes went up and multicast trashed the network. And everyone screamed about low latency. Now we’re seeing the pendulum swing back to separate networks for messaging again. We don’t have time to manage one network and soon we’ll have two.

=rob.ciampa

Tags: rmds (1) market data (4) low latency (4) 

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