Network Instruments: Monitoring network microbursts crucial to financial trading firms

As the U.S. Treasury Secretary copiously spends billions of taxpayer money on the financial crisis, Network Instruments (NI) has been keen to point out to yours truly that the effectiveness of a financial trade is measured in nanoseconds, not milliseconds, necessitating drill down capabilities to a finite moment of time in order to monitor microbursts (microbursts are sub-second periods of time when major bursts of network usage occur).

Microburst Analysis

According to Charles Thompson - NI manager of system engineering, "When trading floors open at 9:30 am Eastern time, their networks are flooded with a ridiculous number of trades that have been queued up since the night before.

"To analyze performance issues, network managers often have to break out a one-second period into smaller, microscopic intervals.

"So, they'll chop up the one-second interval into 100 millisecond intervals, 10 millisecond intervals, or 5 microsecond intervals for investigations.

"When you get to sub-second resolution, it's referred to as a microburst. It's a small period of time when a major burst of usage occurred.

"Inside the GigaStor you can now set screen resolution to view 10 nano-second increments. In 10Gb environments, the smallest interframe spacing is 9.6 nanoseconds. You can now drill down on the GigaStor screen to view an individual packet. It's ridiculous resolution. But, we've had many customers requiring 100 microsecond increments, who will take advantage of this drill down capability."

Network Instruments and its detecting and troubleshooting microbursts competitor - NetScout, both cite a quote that appeared in an InformationWeek article:

"A 1-millisecond advantage in trading applications can be worth $100 million a year to a major brokerage firm."

Adding to the discussion on the importance of monitoring microbursts, a Financial Services Technology (FST) article pointed out:

"Essential to the day-to-day operation of trading houses, hedge funds, investment banks, foreign exchanges, and other global financial institutions and market exchanges with trading desks is the ability to identify and monitor microbursts, latency and packet loss for critical market data and trading applications and their associated protocols."

Do you identify and monitor microbursts on your network?

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• Cisco
• Data Center
• LANs / WANs
• Network Management
• Security
• Identify and monitor microbursts
• Importance of monitoring microbursts
• Microburst Analysis
• Microbursts are sub-second periods of time when major bursts of network usage occur
• Network Instruments and its detecting and troubleshooting microbursts