GemStone Joins Forces With Intel

NEW YORK—GemStone Systems will use Intel for its high-speed data access and distribution capabilities, according to officials from both companies. The offering, dubbed GemFire on Intel for Financial Services (GIFS), is targeted at the hardware architectures from Intel.

On Wall Street, "the onus is on speed and efficiency," and GemStone has been targeting GemFire as the data store that "holds all the data you need for trading, risk and market data," says Shankar Iyer, executive vice president of marketing and strategy at GemStone. "It holds this data in memory and makes that data available in rich form to applications so they can act on this data and execute at very high speeds," Iyer says.

In addition, GemFire has upgraded from a 32-bit to a 64-bit architecture, but "we can manage greater volumes on the Intel platform," says Bharath Rangarajan, director of product marketing for GemStone.

The GIFS release offers data distribution layered on top of I/O acceleration technology; high availability models and system management framework; and a toolset for optimizing performance in native environments, Rangarajan says.

GemStone is running "large-scale tests and benchmarks," says Rangarajan. These tests and benchmarks are being "done internally on behalf of certain key customers," says Iyer.

GIFS is currently deployed in approximately 10 investment banks, and "about a dozen more are in pilots and proof-of-concept stages," says Iyer. By year's end, he expects to sign on an additional eight to 10 clients.