CBOE Upgrades NJ Network

Exchange operator CBOE Holdings selected Arista Networks and Solarflare to provide low-latency switches and network interface cards (NICs), respectively, as part of an infrastructure upgrade in the first quarter of this year, according to CBOE officials.

"When we rolled out the East Coast operations, we deployed the newest x86 servers and decided to upgrade the network switches and network interface cards," says Gerald O'Connell, executive vice president and CIO of CBOE.

As part of the upgrade, O'Connell's team moved its C2 Options Exchange network, located in Equinix's NY4 datacenter in Secaucus, NJ, from a 1 Gbps network to a 10 Gbps network. Early last month, they also moved their CBOE Stock Exchange (CBSX) into the same facility.

"We have used the vendors in other places in the past, so this was not our first experience with them," adds O'Connell.

By using Solarflare's "OpenOnload" capability, users can reduce latency, lower network jitter and increase the message rate substantially, according to Russell Stern, CEO of Solarflare. "What we try to do is tie the needs of the applications tighter with the application stack," he says. "It provides a direct path to the application straight out to the network, which avoids interrupts, context switching, cash flushes and data copies—all the things that can happen to you in kernel networking," says Stern.