NYSE Euronext Rolls Out Solarflare EnterpriseOnload

To lower latency and improve the performance of its 10 Gbps network infrastructure in its Mahwah, NJ, and Basildon, UK, datacenters, NYSE Euronext has deployed a middleware and network interface card (NIC) combination from Solarflare, according to vendor officials.

During the first quarter of this year, NYSE Euronext started using the vendor's Solarflare SFN5122F 10GbE sever adapters and EnterpriseOpenOnload software to handle the exchange's market data feed handlers and trade messaging, says Russell Stern, CEO of Solarflare.

The EnterpriseOpenOnload platform loads as a library into the system and provides applications with a direct path to the network, avoiding the networking stack.

“If a message needs to make a network call, that process would include creating an interrupt and content switches, and performing memory flushes,” says Stern. "All of these things tend to add a lot of latency and latency jitter."

Currently Solarflare offers two versions of its middleware platform: EnterpriseOpenOnload, which is hardened for enterprise use, and OpenOnload, an open source distribution. "The main difference between the two platforms is that the enterprise version is released more slowly since enterprise users need more time to address change confirmations and validations," Stern explains.