There’s an old set of tradeoffs between buying services or “doing it yourself,” where it comes to computing or communications infrastructure. Hosted VoIP virtually always makes more sense than buying systems for a smaller business. But premises-based solutions typically are more economical for large enterprises.

Something of the same argument can be when companies or people choose between cloud computing services and building their own data centers. Obviously, large enterprises often justify building their own data centers. Others might be able to justify renting space in somebody else’s data center. Smaller organizations might well find that renting computing cycles is the better choice.

Google Sr. Manager, Production Network Engineering and Architecture at Google argues that the decision is highly dependent on duty cycle. Steady, predictable loads, especially at a high rate of utilization, will tip economics in favor of self-operated or co-located facilities. Highly-variable demand, and low volume, will tend to tip the economics in favor of a cloud computing solution.

“Think of it as taking a taxi vs. buying a car to make a trip between San Francisco and Palo Alto,” says Gill. “If you only make the trip once a quarter, it is cheaper to take a taxi.” But “if you make the trip every day, then you are better off buying a car.”

“The difference is the duty cycle. If you are running infrastructure with a duty cycle of 100 percent, it may make sense to run in-house,” says Gill. The detailed assumptions and analysis are here  http://ow.ly/315qD

The coming data tsunami (aka ‘Big Data) threatens to swamp enterprises that are ill-prepared to manage and analyze massive data sets. Indeed even terms used to describe the quantity of data – gigabytes and terabyes, are rapidly giving way to petabyte, exabytes, and zetabytes (1 ZB = 10²¹ bytes). Petaflop/exaflop computing processing speeds and storage technologies are enabling companies to explore new business models such as in Life Sciences with genomics and personalized drug dosing.

A multitude of information technologies are increasingly used by CIOs in efforts to stay afloat in a sea of data. For example, Enterprise Data Warehouse solutions (EDW) have become major growth businesses for firms like Teradata. In the past year, cloud services and distributed computing technologies offer enterprises an ability to leverage scalable compute and storage resources on a virtualized basis to help address this issue. With cloud-based storage and compute services, the notion of owning IT infrastructure (i.e., servers and data centers) may seem quaint if not somewhat bizarre in coming years. Yet with all the promise of cloud computing, looming large as a potential barrier are performance inadequacies of typical enterprise networks and public internet connections. These networks lack sufficient bandwidth to fully unleash the true potential of cloud computing technology. Read More Now

CFN Services has lowered their latency from NY – Sao Paulo; Chicago – Sao Paulo and DC- Sao Paulo.Contact CFN Now: http://www.cfnservices.com/freetrial/startnow.html

Electronic Trading Reaches Maturity in Brazil, Says Exchange by Wall Street & Technology

(http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/exchanges/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=ZI0QJTYV31XW1QE1GHRSKH4ATMY32JVN?articleID=226700036)

CEP platforms are increasingly connecting to Brazil’s BM&FBovespa, which is now the sixth largest derivatives market in the world with growth of 67% in the first quarter of 2010.

The Brazilian market continues to see strong growth in electronic trading, with hedge funds and high frequency firms in Brazil increasingly deploying volatility and arbitrage strategies.

“We are coming to a stage of great maturity in our markets, after three years working hard to promote electronic trading. As a result of this maturity level, we see more and more CEP tools ready to connect to our markets,” Marcio Castro, IT officer of trading systems at BM&FBovespa, tells WS&T.

“We are increasing [our capacity] in terms of latency and throughput. We have collocation available for all BM&F Bovespa markets. Last year, we doubled our capacity for the equities business,” he noted.

Customer Retention: The Power of Insight

Leveraging insurers’ reams of data to identify and pursue loyal customers

The Brazilian exchange is also working on a project with CME Group to build a new matching engine for Bovespa, Castro said.

Castro’s comments follow the announcement that Streambase’s Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform has been extended to connect to BM&FBOVESPA, Brazil’s derivatives and equities exchange and one of the world’s largest exchanges in market value.

This will allow StreamBase to provide algo trading firms with low-latency connectivity to the Brazilian exchange, enabling them to trade on an extensive range of Brazilian products and hedge their risk across international markets, according to BM&FBovespa.

Trading volumes on Bovespa, the cash exchange, and the BM&F derivatives exchange in have grown ten-fold in the last 10 years, while the stock exchange value has gone up four times, says Martin Koopman, an independent analyst to the securities industry who recently wrote a TABB Group report entitled “Latin American Electronic Trading: Caliente!”

In his report, Koopman noted that BM&FBOVESPA is now the sixth largest derivatives market in the world with growth of 67% in the first quarter of 2010.

“I found that locals are trading more,” he says. “You have a blend of institutions, a growing number of hedge funds and quite a sophisticated group of broker dealers. But now there is a lot of international interest in the [Brazilian] market too. Hedge funds are looking at it, high frequency firms in Brazil are deploying volatility and arbitrage strategies. You can collocate at both Bovespa and BM&F today. There’s low latency data available from the exchanges. So broker dealers and hedge funds are using low latency strategies. It’s a very exciting time,” he adds.

“Brazil is an interesting market,” Richard Tibbetts, CTO of Streambase, agrees. “There are parallels with the Canadian market and how its equity market has matured.”

Last week, StreamBase also announced a partnership with Sao Paulo, Brazil-based Alphastream, a provider of professional services and tools to building next- generation electronic trading systems.

Hamilton Araujo, managing director of Alphastream commented that StreamBase’s visual development environment would allow the company to work with customers – both business analysts and developers – to create “sophisticated strategies with an event-driven trading infrastructure.”

What is Dim Fiber?
Optical fiber only partially lit in a fiber optic transmission system (FOTS) employing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).WDM technology can support a considerable number of wavelengths running simultaneously over a single optical fiber within a cable comprising perhaps a great number of fibers. A dim fiber is one over which not all available wavelengths have been lit and which, therefore, has excess capacity.

Why Dim Fiber?

A dim Fiber customer gets assigned a wavelength in a fiber span that provides flexibility and performance similar to dark fiber with the following benefits:

• Use of fiber span not limited to a specific bandwidth, just a specific wavelength, thus the customer has more control.
• Reduced equipment on the circuit reducing potential outages.
• Reduced equipment on the circuit reducing processing latency.
• Dark Fiber performance at a lower cost.
• Dark Fiber performance with a variety of contract terms closer to customer experience with lit services.

Why CFN Services Dim Fiber Solutions?

• With CFN Services as your partner on your dim fiber plans – CFN will manage and monitor the health of the fiber span via other circuits running on the same fiber span.
• Dim Fiber allows wireless operators to take advantage of the owners economics and cost efficiencies of a managed backhaul solution, which provides lowest per unit cost as the backhaul traffic increases
• CFN takes away the hassle and worry of managing an Outside Plant Network such as relocations, construction, outages, etc. by managing the full solution so as a customer you get only the benefit of dim without the down side.
• For longer spans, CFN can provide mid-span regeneration reducing equipment, new collocations and operational cost and complexity for the customer.

Contact CFN Services to see if Dim Fiber is the solution for you: Contact CFN Now

Denver, CO – August 10, 2010 – National data center and peering provider CoreSite announces today that two

of the top economic news service providers have deployed at the company’s Washington, DC data center at 1275 K Street. The DC data center and colocation facility is located approximately one mile from the United States Department of Labor, Departme

nt of Commerce and Department of The Treasury. Need to Know News and Rapidata deliver low latency economic news to high-frequency trading firms, investment banks, and other entities with a vested interest in receiving market data as quickly as possible. With critical, market-moving data being released directly from the U.S. Departments of Labor, Commerce and Treasury, these companies identified CoreSite as the best data center in the closest proximity. Read More

The federal government has begun what looms as the largest data center consolidation in history, hoping to dramatically reduce IT operations that are currently distributed among more than 1,100 data centers.

On Friday Federal CIO Vivek Kundra outlined details of the ambitious plan in a memo that directs federal agencies to prepare an inventory of the IT assets by April 30 and develop a preliminary data center consolidation plan by June 30. These plans will need to be finalized by Dec. 31, 2010, with implementation beginning in 2011.

Huge Implications for Data Center Sector
The government data center consolidation has huge implications for the fortunes of system integrators, data center service providers (especially in northern Virginia), and cloud computing platforms optimized for hosting government apps.

The consolidation effort figures to generate significant business for companies providing energy efficiency tools and consulting, as Kundra signaled that reducing energy costs will be a driving force in the effort. He noted that the number of government data centers soared from 432 in 1999 to the current 1,100 plus.

“This growth in redundant infrastructure investments is costly, inefficient and unsustainable and has a significant impact on energy consumption,” said Kundra. “In 2006 Federal servers and data centers consumed 6 billion kwH of electricity, and without a fundamental shift in how we deploy technology it could reach 12 billion kwH by 2012.”

First Assessment Due April 30
The immediate challenge: Federal agencies must conduct a “high-level assessment” of all their IT assessments and data centers by April 30, followed by a more detailed accounting by July 30.

In announcing the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, Kundra outlined four high-level goals:

* Promote the use of Green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers;
* Reduce the cost of data center hardware, software and operations;
* Increase the overall IT security posture of the government;
* Shift IT investments to more efficient computing platforms and technologies.

That last bullet point is boosting expectations that a meaningful chunk of government IT operations will be shifted to a cloud computing model. Kundra discussed this prospect at an appearance Friday, saying the federal government is looking for “game-changing approaches” to deal with the problematic growth in data centers rather than “brute force consolidation.”

“This is a huge opportunity to apply best practices from the private sector,” Kundra told Federal Computer Week. “It is a huge problem. The path we are on does not make sense.”

Likely to Boost Data Center Demand
But the cloud model won’t make sense for all federal applications. If recent consolidations by companies like HP and Intel are any indication, the drive for greater efficiency will render many of the current data center properties obsolete. Many older data facilities do not have the power capacity to support a highly-utilized equipment space. Consolidation also leads to higher densities, which are more difficult to cool in legacy facilities.

That means new data center space, most likely in northern Virginia and Maryland. Systems integrators and companies building cloud platforms have been among the players driving demand for data center space in northern Virginia, where demand has been strong and new supply has been limited. As the federal consolidation moves ahead, that demand is likely to increase as federal agencies identify new requirements.

The federal consolidation is also likely to be good news for server vendors, as consolidations usually include hardware refreshes to take advantage of the latest advances in computing power and energy efficiency.

THE CURRENT ENVIRONMENT
When financial services and other firms around the world rely on your global infrastructure to transact business, you need to ensure low latency and highest reliability possible. That’s one of the key reasons CFN Services chose Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers for colocation. The provider of network services wanted a partner that enabled it to continue delivering premium services.
THE SOLUTION
CFN evaluated a variety of data center providers, ultimately choosing Equinix. “It’s important that we partner with one of the largest colocation providers to get closer to our growing base of electronic trading customers. Moreover, Equinix’s quality of service, reliability, and professionalism are renowned,” explains Wil Tirado, vice president of Engineering for CFN.
Equinix’s focus on specific vertical markets was also key because it aligns with CFN’s
go-to-market approach. “Equinix’s knowledge of the needs of different industries allows
us to leverage relevant product offerings in those spaces,” continues Tirado.
WHY EQUINIX
Maintaining carrier neutrality
CFN develops customized network solutions that optimize connections to multiple exchanges and trading venues. To ensure optimized connections along with diversity offerings, CFN’s Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure spans multiple providers. As a carrier-neutral network integrator, CFN sought a partner with the same approach.
“A network neutral and carrier rich data center enables us to be responsive to
our customers’ requirements. Equinix allows us to ensure we continue providing our customers with the most optimized network solutions,” says Tirado.
CFN serves customers in the enterprise, public sector, and carrier markets, including financial traders that require very high network performance. The electronic trading community requires high speed connectivity to reduce risk and stay competitive. These financial customers gain significant benefits from CFN’s commitment to continually optimize its network as part of its Low Latency Improvement Plan. In addition to using FiberSource®, its proprietary nationwide infrastructure knowledge and relationship base of nearly 250,000 route miles of fiber and 550 metro networks, CFN leverages all means necessary to decrease latency and insure diversity on its routes.

“It’s unique to find a great combination of network availability from multiple carriers colocated with a dense community of financial market participants. Equinix is a key component of our ever-growing global low-latency infrastructure.”
Wil Tirado, Vice President of Engineering, CFN Services. Download Full Case Study

Ultra-Low Latency Connectivity and Proximity Collocation offering for local and international financial institutions and vendors looking to participate in the United States equities, futures and options marketplaces

CFN Services has announced their continued commitment to provide lowest latency connections to all Global Exchanges, expanding and improving latencies to 6 new locations in between New York, New Jersey and Chicago.  CFN Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure currently supports over 25 data centers spread out across 7 countries.

The newest locations announced are:

NJ/NY Metro

• 5851 Westside Ave., North Bergen, NJ
• 755 Secaucus Rd., Secaucus, NJ
• 120 W. Passaic, Rochelle Park, NJ

Chicago Metro

• 400 S. LaSalle, Chicago, IL
• 440 S. LaSalle, Chicago, IL
• 10 S. Canal St. Chicago, IL

CFN Services Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure is designed to facilitate trading and information exchange in global capital markets where trade execution speed is critical. The solution offers financial services firms such as brokers, hedge funds, exchanges, asset managers, and pre and post-trade services providers a fully managed, highly available optimized infrastructure, providing easy scalability and growth as trading firms enter new geographies and asset classes.

Cloud computing is the talk of the town. What is all the buzz about? Cloud computing provides companies the ability to quickly and cost effectively deploy new hardware, storage and software solutions. Cloud Computing avoids the need to utilize large capital budget investments to introduce new applications and solutions to the Enterprise.  Cloud computing also supports our new mobile world. Moving the applications and infrastructure to the cloud makes them available from any device – providing the ability to work anywhere anytime and have full access to the entire infrastructure required.

With all the good news about cloud computing what are the issues? The number one issue is latency. What is latency? It is the time it takes for a signal to travel from one point to another in telecom networks.  Businesses’ increased reliance on telecom networks and improved processing speeds for computer networks and the Local Area Networks (LANs)/Wide Area Networks (WANs) that interconnect them, have combined to make the speed at which a signal travels in a telecom network more noticeable and critical.  Technologies such as cloud computing cannot be successful if the end user does not have a good experience.

Applications which are most susceptible to latency are those which depend most heavily on high transaction rate processes which drive CPU per second cycles, memory and storage read/write requests, and server requests. Examples of latency sensitive applications range from multimedia streaming, video transcoding, multi-player network gaming to telesurgery and computerized trading. CIOs operating private clouds as well as large cloud service providers need a flexible and robust network architecture that reduces latency to acceptable levels for their particular application.

Cloud computing networks are moving away from the typical three-layer switching topology in which access switches are connected to a large pool of aggregation or distribution switches that are then connected to the core. The concern with the traditional model is latency — it forces packets to stop at hops at every layer and doesn’t provide any-to-any communication between the hundreds of servers and migrating VMs (virtual machines) necessary in a cloud environment.

It is expected that, over time, enterprises will build cloud networks with a distribution layer of 10 GbE switches (and ultimately 40 GbE and 100 GbE once these standards are approved) that is flattened or broadened out, becoming the communication link between servers with as few blocks as possible. This middle layer of Ethernet switches will be built as a larger fabric so that enterprises can manage them as one or a couple of large switches.

How do you choose the correct connectivity that will take into account all of these latency variables? You want to go with a partner that has a reputation for managing latency and has always designed on layer 1 transport. CFN Services has been established as the low latency leader in the financial services electronic trading market. Where a millisecond of latency can mean the difference of a million dollars, gaining a reputation as the low latency leader provides CFN Services unprecedented credibility.  CFN Services Global Low Latency Exchange Infrastructure separates itself from other networks because CFN is a not a carrier. CFN has built a custom “community” Trading Cloud on this infrastructure which enables many major trading firms to compete at the speed of light. The network performance demands in this type of environment are unrivaled by most enterprise cloud requirement.

CFN Services is carrier neutral provider who designs and implements low latency networks. CFN understands all the variables and components of latency and has optimized their Global Low Latency Exchange Infrastructure to reduce any undue latency.  Take advantage of the network that is supporting major banks and trading firms for your cloud computing. Hit the ground running by partnering with CFN and take advantage of COATS – Cloud Optimized Access and Transport Services and their already optimized Global Low Latency Exchange Infrastructure and ensure you have the reach and low latency required to support your cloud strategy.

CFN Services is committed to helping Financial Service firms continually lower their latency. Offering customers not just low latency options today, but also for the future by continuing the success of their Low Latency Improvement Plan. Introduced in early 2009, CFN Services has upheld their commitment to continually lower latency for their existing customers. As we know the best latency today, is not the best latency in 12 months, which makes it imperative to choose a partner who is committed and guaranteed to continually work on optimizing their network.

Here is an update of some of the most recent announcements by CFN Services, which enumerate their commitment to the financial services trading market place:

• Drastically reduced latency from Chicago – NY/NJ
• Offering a Latency Improvement Plan Guarantee – Committing to lower latency for today and tomorrow
• Proving bandwidth options from 50mb and up bundled or unbundled to include collocation and multiple locations
• Announcing Loyalty Programs for latency, pricing and promotions
• Continual expansion of the their CFN Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure, connecting global exchanges via an Optimized Low Latency Infrastructure

CFN Services has continually set themselves apart in the race for Alpha, due to the intelligence and experience they bring to Network and Proximity Optimization. Utilizing FiberSource®, knowledge based platform which provides them the ability to view all available fiber, including that of Utilities, Carriers, Dark Fiber and Collocation Providers; in order to optimize turnkey network routes or provide custom network solutions specific to a customer’s exact requirements and priorities, allows CFN the ability to ensure that a trading firm’s connectivity plan drives their trading strategy.

CFN Services currently operates a low latency global infrastructure connecting over 20 data centers globally in Toronto Metro, New York Metro, New Jersey Metro, Chicago Metro, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, London Metro, and Sao Paulo.