Bionic financial infrastructure

In the 1970s, a pop culture phenomenon was born in the form of an American television series about an astronaut who got a hardware upgrade to his legs, arm, and an eye, after which he could see and do things that purely biological people could not.

Today, financial services infrastructure is undergoing a similar change. What financial firms have always done in software is now increasingly possible in hardware, enabling capabilities that simply weren’t possible in software alone, at substantially higher performance.

What makes the hardware option especially attractive is the recent dramatic increase in industry data rates, which looks only more troubling as we turn an eye to the future. Moving software functionality such as messaging, content inspection, content routing, format conversions, high-speed fan-out and security into purpose-built chipsets fundamentally changes what is possible and is breathing new life into financial information architectures.

Hardware solutions take two common forms today: information appliances, which focus on accelerating specific data operations; and content-aware routers, which form a new, wire-speed intelligence layer in the network that can be shared by all applications. This second approach offers substantial price performance benefits for financial firms as they look to a future where the only certainty is more demanding applications, traders, customers and shareholders.

Hardware Infrastructure Cost Advantages
Financial firms have long lived with the escalating costs of existing infrastructures. Racks of servers that need to be frequently refreshed just to take advantage of incremental CPU performance increases and the complexity of administering distributed real-time applications continue to impact costs. A hardware-based infrastructure addresses many of these problems through:

• Simplified distributed applications – Moving application intelligence into the network means applications can be more decoupled. This allows much of the complexity of distributing information to be eliminated. Publishers publish and subscribers subscribe. They no longer need to agree in advance on topics or subjects since sophisticated rules based on the content of the message directs information between producer and consumer.
• Fewer infrastructure and application servers – Each hardware router performs key tasks with 10 to 100 times greater throughput and lower latency than software equivalents. This means a significant reduction in the number of servers required to support information distribution, which brings corresponding savings in maintenance, time, power and cooling.
• Simplified administration – A single, high-performance, low-latency infrastructure can be shared by many applications, most of which have separate parallel infrastructures today. Scaling the overall infrastructure is as simple as adding another content router. The industry has already gone through a similar simplicity and performance increase when many parallel proprietary networks were consolidated into a shared IP infrastructure more than a decade ago.

Enabling SOA without Sacrificing Performance
To date, moving towards a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and reusable assets has been a trade-off in flexibility versus performance. Content-aware routing networks can make SOA networks as fast, or faster, than proprietary alternatives. When messaging, content inspection, content routing, data transformations and information fan-out are all handled in hardware, many of the performance dragons of SOA can be slain with sub-millisecond speed.

The primary data format associated with web services and SOA is XML, which has caused concern for many financial firms. XML is perceived to add unwanted latency because it takes time to process, and uses unwanted bandwidth since XML documents are wordier than their binary equivalents. Content-aware hardware makes XML processing time a non-issue. In fact, when compression and WAN filtering are considered, it can actually reduce overall bandwidth for many applications.

Content and Data Service Providers Look to Hardware
These recent advances in infrastructure hardware have caught the attention of content service providers and data networking providers alike, many of whom are upgrading their own network infrastructures to make them intelligent. Content-aware technologies are helping content service providers improve existing services with better performance and construct new services that weren’t technically possible in the past. For data service providers, content-aware networking allows them to add an application layer within their networking cloud with an emphasis on intra-company or wide-area data sharing services. For both types of service providers, having traditional software functionality inside network hardware means they achieve better reliability and performance guarantees for their services, thereby providing a leg up on the competition.

For financial firms, these advances mean more options for outsourcing and improved options for managing wide-area network traffic. As both enterprise and service provider networks better understand the traffic they carry, administrators, developers and users can determine with much more granularity which information needs to travel where.

Moving the Bar on What’s Possible
World class athletes today must be satisfied with incremental improvements in performance as they dedicate all their energies to their specialties. But how many of us wondered how Colonel Steve Austin would have fared in almost any Olympic event with his bionic advantages? For the first time, financial firms have an alternative that offers that kind of advantage as they look at their competitive landscape and plan for the future. Content-aware networking offers a fresh take on financial application infrastructure at a time when it is being asked to do more than ever before.