ACADEMIA

FSMLabs announced that TimeKeeper now runs on the Arista 7124sx and other Arista Networks switches. Arista switches are recognized by industry watchers and users of time-critical applications as the top-performing network switches in terms of speed and low-latency. The result of the TimeKeeper plus Arista combination is ultra high precision time synchronization and time resilience on a key building block of time-critical networking.

"Our customers who care most about precision time management are often Arista Networks customers too," said FSMLabs CTO Cort Dougan "Thanks to great cooperation with the Arista technical team, we've produced a combination package with extraordinary performance for our shared customers. There is no question that TimeKeeper's timing network resiliency is a hot topic for these customers, and we have several who have been eager to install TimeKeeper on Arista."

While distributing and synchronizing time at the sub-microsecond level to networked applications, TimeKeeper can also serve as a "time hub" or boundary clock. It monitors reference time from multiple sources -- PTP, NTP, and even pulse-per-second -- and generates high-precision reference time for downstream clients using both PTP and NTP.

With resiliency provided by redundant time sources, TimeKeeper is easily programmed to prioritize multiple time sources, enabling failover to the back-up if the current primary reference source develops problems. Timing performance is logged at every node, servers and clients, to provide an auditable cross-check of time precision across networks, as well as triggering alerts to operators or administrative programs if performance issues rise.

"As high-speed trading becomes both faster and also time-sensitive to market movement and venue latency, the risk of the most minor failures in reference time becomes potentially more costly," says Ed Chapman, vice president of business development, Arista Networks. "TimeKeeper's integration with Arista's switches provides our mutual customers a world-class time management solution, and is another example of the remarkable extensibility and openness of Arista EOS."

The integration of TimeKeeper across Arista switches is made possible through Arista EOS, an advanced network operating system, enabling open third-party development. Arista's award-winning 7100 series of high performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches offer up to 48 ports of non-blocking line rate bandwidth and low-latency switching with the highest port density in a 1 RU form factor.