By Geno Valente, XtremeData

For IT pros in financial services, keeping up with the speed of business is becoming increasingly tougher and more expensive. The information demands from trading, risk management, fraud prevention and financial modelling groups are too often not being met with the existing computing infrastructure. Performance is falling short while IT budgets are simultaneously being constrained. At the same time, data complexity is rapidly rising and fueling wider, deeper analysis, which is essential to developing predictive models that enable pre-emptive business strategies. What is needed for next-generation financial decision support computing are standards-compliant systems that deliver significantly more computing power-per-dollar. An attractive system would offer performance in the range of 1TB/minute of sustained SQL processing, while using substantially less energy and offering a roadmap to next-generation technology.

Effectively catching up with business intelligence processing requirements in the near future requires an entirely new category of standardised high-performance database appliances, running full-table scans and ad-hoc queries up to two orders of magnitude faster than anything currently available. This article explains why new system capabilities like these are needed to deliver what’s becoming essential to the financial IT infrastructure and what they might look like.

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It seems that most publications are either reviewing the major stories and trends of 2008, or making predictions for 2009. So, not to be left out, here are a few thoughts of my own …

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It wasn’t really a press announcement but this past week, Microsoft made public some information about how it plans to build its next generation data centres - Generation 4 as it calls them. Quite a lot has been written in the techie press about the approach - which calls for connecting up containerised data centre units in data centre compounds that have walls but no roofs - but for myself, it makes me think just how much Microsoft is changing.

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On his LooseBolts blog, Microsoft’s General Manager, Global Foundation Services, Mike Manos, has just outlined the company’s Generation 4 Modular Data Centre plan, Microsoft’s vision for its cloud data centre infrastructure in the next five years. The plan calls for data centres to be built using containers - prefabricated server farms complete with electrical and security components. Microsoft’s data centres support its current Live offerings as well as planned Azure cloud computing initiatives.

Application management specialist Tideway has released Tideway Foundation 7.2, which now offers users a single platform from which to analyse power consumption statistics for business applications, view their carbon footprint, and ensure end-of-life, unsupported software is not being used in production applications.

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HP today set out an internal technology plan that will underpin its future growth, with cost savings of more than $1 billion annually. Data centre and server consolidation, and application standardisation and virtualisation, play big roles in the plan. Energy costs will be reduced by some 60%.

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Sun Microsystems has introduced the Sun Storage 7000 family (aka Amber Road), which combine physical disk storage with solid state disk (SSD) Flash storage for read and write caching, all managed by Solaris 10’s ZFS file system. As well as high performance, the storage systems are designed to lower power consumption significantly.

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Microsoft used its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week to announce Windows Azure, a cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, designed to allow developers build applications that will span cloud and enterprise data centre deployment, and deliver them to PCs, the web and mobile devices. Dell stands to gain as Azure takes off, since it’s supplying infrastructure to run Microsoft’s cloud data centres.

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Rackable Systems has released the C2005 server, designed for flexibility and configurability. The C2005 couples half-depth design and efficient power supplies with a range of Intel and AMD-based board options, low-voltage processors and low-power hard drives (including solid-state disks - SSDs).

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There I was, expecting to write something for this week’s wrap about the ongoing battle between Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and InfiniBand in the data centre interconnect space. FCoE just got a real boost from storage vendors EMC and NetApp. But more detailed analysis of that can wait. For this week, I am intrigued by stories appearing in the UK about Morgan Stanley’s plan to build a data centre in Scotland powered by tidal energy.

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Storage vendor EMC has introduced the Connectrix NEX-5020, its first Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switch to enable transfer data between physical and virtual servers and storage systems over high speed, lossless 10 Gb/s Ethernet networks. EMC also certified FCoE network adaptors from Emulex and QLogic. Separately, NetApp also certified the Emulex adaptors.

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Sun Microsystems and its partner Fujitsu have introduced the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server. With up to 32 cores, 256 threads and 512 GB of memory, the 4U “Niagara” system running Solaris 10 is aimed at mid-range transaction processing, database and other enterprise applications, as well as server consolidation through virtualisation.

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The market is truly in the crapper. Not even CNBC’s Erin Burnett can make the cascading crash we saw this week look good. For IT vendors selling into financial services, the next few months are going to be very tough. Case in point: InfiniBand player Voltaire came out this week revising down 3Q estimates due to “multi million dollar” orders from two financial customers not coming through as planned. But there is opportunity in every crisis …

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Merrill Lynch is adopting IBM’s iDataPlex servers to build an internal cloud within its data centres to reduce power consumption, and related costs. As the investment bank is integrated into Bank of America, cost savings are a top priority. Specifically, the servers will help Merrill Lynch build and evaluate new risk-analysis programs.

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