Ambreesh Khanna's Weblog: Ambreesh Khanna's Weblog

There is an interesting report out by Forrester on the subject line. I am required to say it in a very specific fashion, so here goes!

Sun invites you to read the following independent Forrester report titled "European Financial Services Architecture Shows Clear Strategic Direction"(January 2008) in which Forrester reports Solaris as one of the top 3 most strategically positioned operating systems in European Financial Services Firms.

The report is here.

Last night alone with the little ones, the three day weekend resulted in complete exhaustion for them, thanks to good friends and lots of partying in sub-zero weather. They want to wake up at 4:30am to go get mommy from the airport tomorrow, flight lands at 5:00am.... sigh....

And cricket went really well too. The invincible Aussies were thrashed, at home, on a ground where they have not lost in decades. Yummy.... really looking forward to 5 more sleepless nights this week!

Talking about sleepless night, Amjad managed to run TCP tests - akin to the UDP ones I had posted earlier, he finished these at 2:28AM PST on the friday before the long weekend! How can I force him to take the weekend to chill?!

The results are below. Please don't compare the absolute numbers to the UDP numbers in the previous post. Amjad had to use a different set of hardware, with very different characteristics. Instead compare the Containers vs. the non-Containers usecases.

Again, an order of magnitude better. Stay tuned for numbers from an ISV application, with components distributed amongst different OS instances versus Containers.

Have had the girls sleeping in my bed last two nights, got kicked to near death both nights. Since this is their last night with just me, they are back in my bed. Never thought it would get to this, but I'll really miss this....

Weekend came and went, not bad at all. The number of invites for playdates, meals and such make me think that we should do this more often! I have eaten better in the last 4 days than have for a while now. If she sees this, I am in trouble.

The little one did lose one more tooth though, and the tooth fairy had to visit. On her previous visits, the fairy has brought little trinkets like bead bracelets, fake pearl necklaces etc. This time, the tooth fairy, being of a rather hirsute persuasion, left behind 4 quarters. Got some quizzical looks in the morning, but that seems to have passed.

Am missing a very important staff kick off meeting for our Q3 and Q4 going on in Santa Clara right now. We - actually they - are discussing some new initiatives that we are planning on launching very soon - Mobile Banking, Ultra Thin Traders desktop and a Low Latency workshop are on the books.

Mobile banking introduces your mobile phone as a new channel for you to do banking - check accounts, move money around, pay bills (while riding the train!) etc. Banks are keen on launching this capability this CY, some already have albeit using a rather arcane approach. Amir from my team and Carl - who heads up our Banking segment - are slated to present the Sun architecture for Mobile Banking at the Mobey Forum in Amsterdam end of this month. If you are around, make sure you stop by and say hello - Amir Halfon and Carl Morath (firstname.lastname@sun.com).

The Ultra Thin Traders Desktop is a response to strong demand from our large Capital Markets customers to reduce the carbon footprint of their trading floors, where each trader runs 3-4 high powered PCs today. As most of these come to the end of their lease lives, the CIOs are looking at alternative technologies to brand themselves green, yes, but also to reap fringe benefits like moving the number crunching to datacenters, and moving these datacenters away from the expensive locales where traders typically sit. The Sunray device is ideal for this situation, as one of the largest UK based bank's Investment Management division recently found out.

The Low Latency work that we are doing I have written about before. The Workshop is a productization of the work that we have done before, and gives us the ability to launch this work outside of New York city. We are targetting London, Frankfurt, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Mumbai with this workshop.

Oh - I am working on a presentation that might be of interest to you. It is intended to talk about Moore's Law, the end of single threaded performance, the systems design challenges that this presents and what we are doing to address this, the OS design challenges and what we are doing in Solaris, the application architect's dilemma and the work going on in our software tools division, new languages like Fortress and innovative concepts such as Transactional Memory. I'll post it on mediacast.sun.com and blog a link in a couple weeks.

Time to go get the girls from school. There is a mommy-child yoga class I have been invited to this evening, followed by dinner... could definitely get used to this!

Wife took off for India, left me behind with two fiesty little girls. Guaranteed I will have a new found respect for all womankind before this episode is over. Day 1 is almost over, just dinner remains. Have not broken them yet, ponytails worked for school (I think) and sugar intake is just a tad over average. OK so they are watching a movie, which is supposed to be a Sat treat.... I don't think mom is reading this blog!

On to some work stuff. We have been doing some interesting work with Solaris Containers for the Securities and Investment Banking customer base. Most view Containers as a technology for consolidation, or for running Linux binaries unmodified on Solaris. That works, and works very well. Tons of examples in the Finance industry where folks are doing this.

My team views Containers as something even more interesting - as a way to reduce latency between applications that communicate with each other. If there is an application that consumes data, and another that generates this data, typically the producer would dump the data onto a messaging bus (Tibco, 29 West seem popular), and the consumer would pick it up. Obviously there is network latency introduced between these components.

If you run the two applications on two Containers instead... an order of magnitude improvement in latency. Amjad from my team ran a simple test. UDP ping pong between 2 systems, vs. between 2 Containers. Results are below.

For applications that are attempting to lower latency, the system backplane outperforms any existing networking technology. Based on this premise, we are looking at using systems with 8 or more cores to consolidate applications such as the various components of Reuters RMDS and their consumers on a single chassis. The fact that quad-core CPUs are pretty much ubiquitous - the Niagara 2 CPU has the equivalent of 64 cores (kinda sorta) - and most enterprises buy minimally dual-socket boxes, we are already talking minimally 8 cores on the smallest system in an enterprise!

Use Containers to consolidate, use Containers to lower latency.

Now that the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack has gone around for the fourth time, its time to go. The weekend is coming up, wish me luck!

Won the first 20-20, who woulda thunk! And now getting thrashed by the Aussies, but who cares....

We published world record numbers for Reuters RMDS, using Solaris 10 on our latest Intel gear. The benchmark report is here. Note that we did this using GbE, and then repeated it with IPoIB using gear from Cisco and Voltaire. The previous world record was held by a vendor of commodity gear, and a Linux distro.

The beauty of the IPoIB benchmark was that we did not use any proprietary IB libararies from any vendor, our numbers were reported using standard IPoIB, and hence can be replicated pretty much using any vendors IB gear. Having said that, we have started work to put the necessary hooks like OFUV into Solaris, so that the vendors can port their offload libs onto Solaris - customers are begging for this - and we expect this work to be completed very early CY08, with the offload libs being released soon after.

Low latency work takes me across the globe - whats interesting is that most conversations are with business users and they all now ask latency questions. Was speaking with a hedge fund earlier this week, they trade equity options on all Exchanges that trade options, and they have two algo platforms for trading and execution. I was speaking with people with titles like "head trader", and when I asked questions about their current infrastructure, I might as well have been speaking in sanskrit. After I decided to give up on the hardware, OS type questions, one of them said that they have low latency requirement, measured in single digit milliseconds.

A bunch of really sharp guys work for me, and they are really really really good at looking at peoples complex systems, and diagnosing where the bottlenecks are. We recently looked at a large equities trading system, and managed to reduce latency - from the point where the order came in via a FIX engine, through various systems out to the trading venue, and then reversing the direction for the ack - to 1/3 of the original. 4 day exercise. Customer was thrilled, and now we are being asked to repeat the exercise in the same shop for other BUs like FX, Fixed Income etc.

How did we do this? DTrace, Studio 12, Solaris techniques like processor binding and interrupt shielding. Standard stuff, and we did this on our new AMD boxes.

OK, now off to see if India has lost anymore games since the 20-20 win. Did I say the 20-20 glow will last a very long time.....?

India lost to Bangladesh, sigh. Pakistan going home, thanks to Ireland. The way Sri Lanka seems to be pummeling Bangladesh right now, my India vs. Pakistan tickets seem well on their way to becoming Bangaldesh vs. Ireland!

For those of you who don't know what the heck I am talking about, its the 2nd largest sporting event on the planet - Cricket World Cup - going on in the West Indies right now. 16 teams, 51 days, wowie!

And for those of you who thought cricket was "stuffy", make sure to read the headline today - Woolmer's (Pakistan's coach, who died immediately after they lost to Ireland) Death Suspicious - Police".

I head up Sun's Global Financial Services tech team. Our job is to look at the trends in Financial Services - Capital Markets, Banking and Insurance - and come up with Solutions.

In Cap Mkts we are focusing on Market Data and low latency trading architectures. With latencies being measured in microseconds, message rates from OPRA getting to 700K/s, its time broker-dealers reevaluate their existing infrastructures. We are being pulled in by some very large ones to look at their architectures and make recommendations on how we can improve latencies and throughput - which typically have an inverse relationship.

In Banking we are working on a couple of things. Payments is the first, where we have created the Open Payments Suite for Back Office Payment Hubs and Consolidated Payment Processors such as ACHs. OPS is built using Sun's Java CAPS (SOA) and Identity Manager on Solaris 10. Distribution Channel integration is the other, where we use Java CAPS, IDM, JES and Solaris to deliver a framework that allows banks to quickly roll out new products and functionality, helping them consolidate their existing silo'd delivery systems. "Single Customer View" is an offshoot of this solution.

In Insurance, we are working on Finance On Request with Partners such as UniRisX to help insurance companies deliver new products through traditional and non-traditional channels. Think India, where Post Offices exist in areas where electricity does not.

Finally, no solution portfolio would be complete without mentioning Compliance. RegNMS, MiFID, SEPA, PEACH, SOX, Basel II, Gram-Leach-Bliley are all funny sounding names that give CxOs nightmares. We have solutions to help with these nightmares.

I also sit on the Board of the Operating Systems Ambassadors - a group of elite customer facing individuals who specialize in OS technologies. I run the NYC/NJ Solaris Users Group. If you would like to become a part, drop me a line. We meet one every 3-4 months.

I am off to Barbados in a few weeks, for what was going to be cheering India on against Pakistan followed by West Indies, not sure who I will cheer for now :-(

More on the sad state of Indian cricket next time.....