Cisco Creates Low-Latency Solution With Reuters Market Data System on Sun's Next-Generation Intel Xeon-Based System

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - September 17, 2007) - High Performance on Wall Street -- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) has collaborated with Reuters and Sun Microsystems to deliver an end-to-end low latency solution for automated and algorithmic trading. Testing by Sun Microsystems showed the solution reduced overall system latency by up to 38 percent, with minimal impact on customer's applications and infrastructure. The tuned solution will enable customers to quickly deploy a low latency market data infrastructure while preserving their investments in existing technology.

This solution provides customers with a multicast direct-feed integration platform to super-charge trading and pricing applications, optimized for high throughput, ultra low latency and high efficiency. In addition, customers can deploy this low latency configuration without re-architecting or upgrading their traditional front-office infrastructure. With this new solution, the traditional front-office infrastructure can serve as a secondary data source for resiliency purposes.

"The continued growth of algorithmic trading, combined with regulations such as RegNMS and MiFID, require capital markets companies to look for the best IT infrastructure and applications possible," said Krish Ramakrishnan, vice president and general manager of the Server Virtualization Business Unit at Cisco. "Cisco is committed to collaborative efforts that provide jointly tested best-in-class solutions in order to give our customers the best possible competitive advantages."

"With current market volatility and record volumes in electronic markets, trading infrastructure must be able to deliver increasing data volumes with lowest possible latency," said Michael Parlapiano, Executive Vice President of Reuters Information Management Solutions. "Reuters is pleased at the continuing innovation that Cisco, Sun and Intel bring to our joint customers to ensure that they continue to get the absolute highest performance from our industry-leading market data platform."

This optimized configuration consists of Reuters Market Data System installed on the Sun Microsystems next generation rackmount server powered by Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 5100 series with Cisco InfiniBand Server Fabric Switches running on the Solaris™ 10 OS. Tests were performed by Sun Microsystems, using standard Reuters test procedures. The tests demonstrated a 32 percent increase in messages per second over other published benchmarks, resulting in a record maximum throughput rate of two million updates per second on a single Reuters Market Data System process.

The Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) is the leading direct exchange feed integration and distribution platform, installed at more than 2,500 Reuters customer sites and powering some of the largest automated trading applications in the financial industry. RMDS is a robust, low latency market data platform that can support huge throughputs of data, not just to the trading floor but to every part of the organisation. Automated trading applications with an extremely low latency tolerance, can be plugged into the multicast backbone, using the latest in network and hardware technologies.

Cisco Server Fabric Switches use standards-based InfiniBand technology to provide a high performance unified fabric for connecting servers together into grids of compute resources. InfiniBand takes advantage of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology to greatly reduce latency, latency jitter and CPU utilization, while increasing the throughput and message capacity of automated trading environments.

Sun's open source Solaris operating system is built on industry standards including long-standing investment in TCP/IP and InfiniBand. Coupled with optimized support for Intel's Xeon Architecture, comprehensive support for third-party hardware and rich innovative functionality, it makes an ideal OS for development and deployment of high-throughput, 24x7x365, mission critical applications.

Dual-Core Intel Xeon 5100 processors 5100 rs series based on Intel ® Core™ architecture offer breakthrough performance and energy efficiency, with large 8MB On-Die cache and dedicated high speed interconnects. This enables reduced latency with sub-millisecond transaction times and more powerful market data delivery.

"In an environment where commercial success or failure can be determined now in microseconds, Sun's commitment to systems and software innovation, in collaboration with Reuters, Intel and Cisco, demonstrates how we help our joint customers deliver the levels of performance necessary to succeed in today's fast moving markets," said Lawrence Scott, VP Global Financial Services Industry, Sun Microsystems. "We look forward to helping customers seize the opportunities presented by these low latency, high throughput solutions to drive their businesses forward."

"The advancements in Intel Xeon® multi-core processors can deliver extraordinary market data rates at the low-latency required by today's trading environment as demonstrated by the record speed of this system," said Jason Waxman, general manager, Intel High Density Servers. "For customers this means an infrastructure that not only can support the demands of today's market data requirements, but can meet the accelerating requirements of the future that will enable customers to grow their businesses."

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About Reuters

Reuters (www.reuters.com), the global information company, provides indispensable information tailored for professionals in the financial services, media and corporate markets.

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