Mellanox Technologies has announced the general availability of Mellanox VMA 5.0 with enhanced TCP acceleration support, providing a unified messaging acceleration platform for all popular networking communications methods such as TCP, Multicast and UDP unicast. Mellanox’s VMA message accelerator has been deployed and is providing immediate return-on-investment benefits in multiple stock exchanges, trading firms and capital market institutions worldwide.

Mellanox VMA 5.0 delivers sustainable latency under loads of over 2.5 million packets per second and dramatically improves UDP latency to under 2.0 microseconds and transparent sockets TCP latency to under 2.5 microseconds, nearly two times better than competitive offerings. Mellanox VMA 5.0, in conjunction with ConnectX-2 adapters, delivers the lowest latency and boosts performance for a wide range of finance/trading and Web 2.0 data center applications.

“As data volumes increase in a variety of financial services and Web 2.0 market segments, data center IT end-users are quickly requiring faster, transparent message acceleration solutions that seamlessly run on their existing high-performance networking infrastructure,” said John Monson, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox’s VMA can improve performance of any socket based application that requires high packet-per-second rates, low data distribution latency, low CPU utilization or increased application scalability.”

Mellanox VMA provides the fastest order execution time, allowing exchanges to increase market share over slower competing venues. For traders, VMA allows the fastest response time to market data and arbitrage opportunities, and the ability to minimize the impact of pre-trade risk management, now being required by new federal regulations.

VMA is a dynamically-linked user-space Linux library for accelerating messaging and streaming traffic. Applications that utilize standard BSD sockets use the library to offload network processing from a server’s CPU, with no application changes required. The application traffic is passed directly to the Mellanox ConnectX-2 10GigE or 40Gb/s InfiniBand adapter from the application user space, bypassing the kernel and IP stack and thus minimizing context switches, buffer copies and interruptions resulting in extremely low latency and higher throughput.

Mellanox's VMA 5.0 boosts performance for message-based applications, lowers latency and increases transactions per second for a wide-array of applications such as:

• Market data consumption & distribution application
• High frequency trading and real-time risk management
• Caching/data distribution
• Multi-sensor data acquisition processing
• Online content delivery and web applications

Availability

Mellanox Messaging Accelerator TCP VMA 5.0 will be available through all Mellanox channel partners and distributors at the end of the second quarter. For more information, please visit www.mellanox.com.