How to Choose 10G Switches for Financial Services Applications

For most financial service companies, time is money. To make the trading systems run as efficiently as possible, financial organizations need an IT ecosystem that’s tuned for ultralow-latency communications, and one of the key components includes network switches engineered for high performance, such as 10 gigabit switches.

Many people may have already done a lot of work on high-speed networks or businesses with high-performance computing (or HPC) applications. They are familiar with the word '10G'. However, they don't know how to choose a 10 gigabit switch that can help them save time and energy during their work. If you are one of them or want to learn how to choose a 10 gigabit switch for your financial applications, please keep reading.

Factors to Consider When Choosing 10G Switches for Financial Services Applications

When it comes to financial services networks, choosing the best 10 gigabit switch is crucial for optimal performance. Here are several factors to consider when making your decision:

Network Latency

Network latency is a term that indicates delay in data communication over a network, which is typically measured in milliseconds (ms). As latency increases, so does the risk of data loss or corruption. In financial services applications, even a few milliseconds of delay can significantly impact performance. A low latency network can improve user experience and support customer satisfaction by helping applications run faster and more smoothly. For this reason, it's crucial for financial applications to select a 10G switch that offers low latency performance.

Normally, for the commonly used Gigabit Ethernet switch, the switch latency ranges from 50 to 125 microseconds. And for 10G switch, the switch latency usually ranges from 5 to 50 microseconds. FS 24-port 10G switches can offer you a min network latency of 0.66 microseconds, which helps you greatly improve your network performance.

Switching Bandwidth

Think of network latency as a journey on the road, and the width of the road can be compared to bandwidth. The wider the road is, the easier it is for traffic to travel on the road. If you want a road to allow vehicles to cross it without delay, it must have enough width to support all the traffic lanes leading up to it (bandwidth) and a tolling system (forwarding rate, PPS) to deal with the number of vehicles (packets) crossing it as they arrive. In other words, if you have small bandwidth, you will be more likely to experience network congestion which indicates a slower Internet connection.

In the financial market, as more and more business trades and banking operations are executed online, higher bandwidth means more revenues, especially for companies that adopt high-frequency trading to earn huge profits. In this case, it is of great importance for financial services to select a 10G switch with large switching bandwidth. However, high bandwidth doesn’t necessarily equal high network performance. Bandwidth won’t matter if data throughput is still being dragged down by latency, or packet loss.

10G switches with QoS (Quality of Service) can help provide different priorities to different applications, users, or data flows in case of the most important applications compete for bandwidth when they need it, thus reducing latency and packet loss on a network as well. Besides, 10G switches that support LACP (link aggregation control protocol) can also help increase bandwidth. LACP enables multiple links to be combined into one logical link to increase bandwidth and network reliability without changing any network infrastructure.

Scalability

In financial services networks, scalability is a critical requirement as well. In other words, you should choose a 10G switch that will be able to handle not only your current needs but also your future requirements. For a 10G switch, scalability refers to its ability to grow both in terms of port speed and the number of input and output ports supported.

For example, a switch with 16 10G ports can support up to 32 x 10G fiber connections for a total of 320 Gb/s throughput capacity. Therefore, the more input and output ports a 10G switch have, the larger throughput capacity it provides and the more flexible your future expansion is. FS offers a 48-port 10G switch that can be scalable up to about 1Tbps per chassis, which provides great flexibility that you need for future growth. If you are looking for ultralow latency 10G switches, FS also offers 10G SFP+ switches that come with larger buffers than most 10G Ethernet switches, which can keep your data safe in case of a switch failure. Other than that, 10G SFP+ switches can pair with fiber optic cables to transmit data, reducing network latency compared to copper cables.

Taking FS 48-port 10G switch N5850-48S6Q as an example, it provides full line-rate switching at Layer 2 or Layer 3 across 48 x 10GbE ports and 6 x 40GbE uplinks, delivering 1.44Tbps switching capacity for the most demanding applications. All ports of the 10G switch support full L2/L3 features, IPv4/IPv6 and OpenFlow for high scalability and Software-defined Network (SDN) for ease of operation. It is designed to meet the high-performance, availability, and network-scaling requirements of financial enterprises and cloud data centers.

Summary

The obvious advantage to deploy 10G switches is, of course, the speeds involved, especially for financial industries, as 10G speeds can make a big difference to productivity. And for choosing a suitable 10G switch, you need to consider the major factors as we explained above. For more 10G switch information, visit us on FS.com.