Company’s low-latency 10G Ethernet server adapter enables unmatched performance for market data and high-frequency trading applications

Solarflare Communications, the pioneer in 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), announced today general availability of its Solarstorm SFN4112F SFP+ 10GbE server adapter. The SFN4112F is currently under trial or deployed in operational networks at numerous major banks and exchanges, and dozens of proprietary trading firms, hedge funds and alternative trading systems. Solarflare is now marketing the SFN4112F directly to data center managers and IT buyers through channel partners. See www.solarflare.com for more details.
 
Through its support of Solarflare’s OpenOnload technology, the SFN4112F provides financial services customers with both sub-5 microsecond TCP/UDP application latency and unmatched message rate performance. OpenOnload is binary compatible with industry standard BSD sockets API, thereby providing acceleration to TCP/UDP applications without modifications to existing applications. Further, OpenOnload reduces latency jitter, bringing a greater level of predictability to message processing latency. Performance of the SFN4112F has been demonstrated in multiple third-party benchmark tests. The adapter showed superior performance with 29West’s Latency Busting Middleware (LBM) and Cisco Catalyst 4900M switches in testing by the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) (http://www.stacresearch.com/node/4967).

The SFN4112F also demonstrated sub-5 microsecond latency in testing with Arista Networks. (http://www.solarflare.com/technology/documents/AristaSolarflare_LowLatency10GigEthernet.pdf)

The Solarstorm SFN4112F is fully compliant with the IEEE 802.3 10G Ethernet standard and supports both direct-attach copper and SFP+ optical transceivers for optical fiber cabling. The adapter is built from the ground up to support low-latency TCP/UDP application performance and scalable, hardware-assisted virtualization. The adapter’s architecture provides up to 4,096 protected interfaces to the host system. Those same vNIC interfaces can be used for OpenOnload or to enable virtual machine application acceleration or CPU core scaling. The adapter also supports stateless off-loads and performance enhancing features that provide efficient processing of network and storage traffic, such as iSCSI acceleration, IPv4 offload, RSS, MSI and MSI-X. The SFN4112F supports Linux, Microsoft Windows 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2, Citrix XenServer 5.5, and is VMware IOVP certified and VMware Ready.

“We’ve had persistent demand from Fortune 100 companies to provide Solarflare-branded server adapters to support their critical high-performance applications. Through their testing, these users have validated that the SFN4112F delivers the best latency performance in the industry and works seamlessly with existing applications without any application modifications,” said Mike Smith, vice president of product marketing at Solarflare. “Making the SFN4112F available to end users meets a critical need for high-performance computing, and is an important step in making our server adapters available to end users on a global basis.” 

“We have been very impressed by the significant contribution the Solarflare SFN4112F with OpenOnload provided to application performance,” said Gregory Lorence, head of product management at 29West. “The Solarflare product is the lowest-latency and highest-throughput 10G adapter we have ever seen.”

Pricing and availability

For more information on pricing and availability of Solarflare products, contact productinfo@solarflare.com or visit www.solarflare.com.