Network Monitoring Appliance Looks Below 1 Microsecond

eweekhickins writes "Corvil has unveiled a new tool to help network managers cope with increasing pressure to improve performance. This appliance, from the Dublin-based company (with backing from Cisco), passively monitors traffic across networks in segments below 1 microsecond in length and correlates monitoring data with remote appliances and gives a complete picture of latency, jitter, packet loss and other phenomena that affect network and application performance. Corvil CEO Donal Byrne noted that 'If you can drop a millisecond [of latency] off, you're a hero.'"

Comments

Re:Oh goodie!

[mccalli]

Now I can get those random stock tips in my email in less milliseconds! I will be rich one day, I will!

Milliseconds count. Maybe not to your stock tips, but trust me as someone who has spent about a decade in this kind of environment now - sub-millisecond latencies certainly count in automated trading between investment banks/hedge funds/whatever. To the point where people are prepared to pay fortunes to have their machines located physically closer to an exchange.

For fun, check out arbitrage, and then ponder again why reducing latency might be important in a competitive environment. Think about highly liquid markets, such as spot foreign exchange.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:and again in layman's terms??

[DigitalCH]

The benefit depends on the person using it. Take an investment bank and an algorithmic trading system. Most of your money is made on volume, the faster you reply the more deals you get, the more volume you have, the more money you make. I've seen a lot of presentations at investment banks where every 5 milliseconds they shave off is $50+ million/year more money they make. Keep in mind that most of these companies have gotten to the point where they can do round trip for the whole trade transaction in 5 milliseconds or less. So each millisecond is like a 20% improvement.

Re:Because you can buy faster hardware.

[doctorcisco]

In a financial trading arbitrage environment, that millisecond would literally be worth millions of dollars. Yes, it matters that much. Some of the best and most expensive brains in the software and systems engineering world are paid a whole lot of money to try to gain that millisecond. At least one "dorm room to gazillionaire" story was built on just such an edge in the early 1990's. The resulting trading firm has $10 billion in net profits since 1998. Warning, there be flash here! http://www.citadelgroup.com/

Do not assume that the people interested in this level of performance are idiots. There's always the possibility they know more about what they're doing than you do.

doc