Key Themes at SIFMA 2008

One could be forgiven for thinking that guest blogger Richard Muirhead of Tideway Systems is in Las Vegas sampling the technological delights and the latest must-have gadgets that are going to wow future generations of teenagers. Instead, he is at the SIFMA Technology Management Conference in New York (the final day no less) where it appears the future of trading resembles a PlayStation video game, and the gamers, Facebookers and tech-savvy teenagers of today are likely to be the future traders of tomorrow. Should we be worried?

Day three at the conference, and several key themes have emerged – this year’s most urgent issues for financial services' IT can be grouped under the following umbrellas:

Extreme Agility
If we now look at the rising expectations of the Facebook and Grand Theft Auto generation - and the fact that in a few short years they will be running the derivatives desk, and from there the bank - this pace of progress simply will not do!

They understand the rate of new features that their favourite websites deliver and have seen the demonstrations of the new handbag rental websites launched on the Amagoogle compute cloud with one dainty tap on the haptic keyboard on their iCommunicator.


Not So Much Efficiency as Survival!
Another thing we heard was there is a more black and white issue that demands attention and a new approach.

First data centres ran out of space, then they ran out of cooling, and now they are running out of power. For each $1 of spend on hardware and software, a further 50 cents is spent to power/cool them. For the 16 million servers across 7000 data centres in the US, that amounts to 350 billion KWhrs - or around 2% of all the electricity in the US.

In California, the sixth largest economy on the planet were it to be a stand alone country, they were recently 345 MW short of a rolling blackout. The average power consumption of new build data centres is 1000 MW so they were four data centres away from lights out.

Virtualisation allows a shift from coping with client estimated demands and the documented but inaccurate or irrelevant power consumption (and thermal output figures for the many infrastructure components required for their operation) - to an intelligent forecast of the non-functional requirements that a given application will place on a virtualised slice of the environment.

The difference could be between the 6000W max power draw documented for safety reasons where actual draw is around 2500W....so that is how cooling should be engineered. All of these allow for dramatic increases in energy, space and hardware efficiency - and virtualisation also means lower certification overhead for different hardware types to boot.

Data Centres Are For Life, Not Just For Christmas

These creatures stick around, sometimes grow into monsters and take a lot of care. Many large organisations have tens or hundreds of data centres....and many would like to consolidate them to single digits. It’s just not that easy. You can't just fire all the teams and you need some carefully engineered data centre redundancy for availability and indeed compliance. But you also need low-latency for trading apps; SaaS apps; or proximate data centres to support large file transfers around development environments, since the world is not yet fully wired with OC192’s.

The imperative for tomorrow’s data centre is to waste no software licenses; drive utilisation of the server estate from 10% up to 60%; keep within space and power constraints; all while ensuring you can quickly put apps into production for a given workforce up through automation.

Whatever the people are saying about the new build data centres, within a decade the contents will be obsolete. But once we know which data centres need to be kept and where the economics on a typical data centre build are, they can be improved by 150m on 350m by making that shift from 10% to 60%.

Complexity Beyond A Single Man’s Ken
Concatenation of behaviours that distributed applications and now virtualisation depends upon can lead to enormous systemic unpredictability. Soon we will be going from seven physical networks per server to one network with virtualised network I/O, where these then become software configurable.

Everything will be virtualised: NAS: load balancer ; LAN; SAN. So then everything can be software provisioned. Ports and servers are dead. As VMs allow application workloads to migrate freely around the estate and the configuration of the application infrastructure shifts into software at all layers, then the policies for network/storage configuration, Q0S and encryption need to match the application and also move with the application.

So the initiatives break down into Consolidate; Virtualise; Automate. But the biggest problem in all of this will be the silos that people currently work in. Shifting people from bragging about their deep abilities with a particular technology, product or vendor or the vast number of ports and servers under their management to the high levels of data center utilisation; extreme application availability and high velocity of application improvement, and all so that we can beat our highest score on Grand Theft Auto or make a (bigger) bonus this year.

Grand Theft Auto and Zero Tolerance

The fun and games continue for guest blogger Richard Muirhead of Tideway Systems on day two of the SIFMA Technology Management Conference in New York, where he gets to grips with the latest data centre switching system from Cisco, which is finding use not only in banks.

SIFMA, day two. What have I learned? The Grand Theft Auto network incorporates the Cisco Nexus 7000. Operational features for preventing human error, including blinking port lights to guide cable swaps, are key.

What does this have to do with SIFMA? We all know how incredibly intense the world of banking has become. Partly due to mounting competition, partly due to existing or planned regulatory compliance as well as cost constraints, a big spadeful to do with mounting product complexity and market diversity and some (I hope at least a little) due to a contrite sense of obligation to the rest of the world to do a “better job” in the wake of the credit crisis. I hope.

So this bit of the Cisco briefing this morning was not news. Neither is the blissful state that application development and operations teams in financial services have been operating within. What do I mean by that? The business wants to deploy an app - well that will be 90 days for an existing app or five or six months for a new one.

And as Doug Gourlay, who runs marketing for Cisco’s Data Center Solutions practice noted, the 'killer' issue is how do you orchestrate multi-admin collaboration across server deployment, app server configuration, database tuning, storage provisioning, security auditing, HVAC installation, cabling and the rest of the gubbins that goes into making an application happen?

Boiled Sweets, Hand-Rolled Cigars and John McCain

Guest blogger Richard Muirhead, CEO and founder of Tideway Systems reports from the SIFMA Technology Management Conference in New York where signs of a looming US recession appear to be masked by fancy cigars, the latest hand-held and software gimmicks and presidential hopefuls courting Wall Street bankers.


Apparently Wall Street technology budgets are in rude health - that is, if the array of attention-grabbing gimmicks at SIFMA today are anything to go by. Nintendo Wiis; iPod Touches; young ladies in Pink Fairy costumes; and our very own Dave Kirby will be thrilled to hear that one messaging vendor featured a dragon boat’s worth of booth attendants resplendent in tie-dye, trippy t-shirts. They stood out, but they were still not a patch on Dave’s tie-dye jumpsuit.

So such great lengths become necessary when all four floors of the exhibition are packed with vendors touting their wares and you are one of innumerable messaging vendors who appear to be one millisecond faster than one another. At that point perhaps it becomes more the battle of the brands than the technologies. Think of tennis for example; could you prove your game is better with a Head tennis racket than a Dunlop, or does it just matter which racket Federer uses?

Virtualisation was sprinkled around liberally also, from the likes of Sun, IBM, Novell and others. As long as it can resist being overshadowed or at least out-shouted by the crescendo of interest in cloud computing, which I think it shall, then I believe server virtualisation’s finest year is yet to come.

The theme of relentless demand for better infrastructures was a recurring one. Data centres are constrained by space, cooling and perhaps latency, which will have a bigger impact on the surge in new builds. Tracking friends via GPS on Helios; video calling on the new consumer friendly iPhone; computationally intensive derivatives portfolio calculations, could create the biggest strain. Have CFO’s accepted yet that the current acceleration in investment is not a blip, but the beginning of a trend?

Other noticeable themes were complex event processing and 'low-latency’; and I am not just referring to the adept networking of the regulars that make up the PR cognoscenti in the 'SIFMA set'.

So, there I was propping up the bar meeting various journalistic characters that were plucked from an Evelyn Waugh novel. That is until the bar opened and I was told that sitting there for 15 minutes without consuming alcohol was not doing my bit to support the US economy and I should move on.

But I was impressed by the number of people milling round the bar, taking it as clear evidence of frantic education and deal-making - or perhaps simply marketing budgets still bulging from the exuberant planning assumptions of 2008. Until, that is, out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a neatly turned out, silver haired gentleman, sweeping from a bank of brass-clad lifts and softly holding court to his entourage.

The presumptive candidate and some might say now in the face of Barrack Obama’s rising tide of popularity, the presumptuous President: John McCain. What was striking was the relatively small number and indeed small stature of his group. That was until 25% of the bar revelers promptly switched off their secret-service earpieces and vanished into sweltering Sixth Avenue.

Today is to culminate in the parties. The largest, hosted by SunGard, great sushi, lashings of sake, but be careful not to drop your guard. The most exclusive, hosted by the unlikely bed fellows of Intel and Sun and featuring every successful executive’s favourite indulgence: hand rolled cigars. All of this nestling under a party theme of trade-processing power undiminished by prudent and conscientious data centre efficiency. A domani.

Sniffing out SIFMA

While other more fortunate journos will be winging their way to New York in a day or two for the annual SIFMA Technology Management Conference, I have been excluded from such a coterie

However, FinancialTech Insider will be covering the buzz on the exhibition floor remotely with the help of Richard Muirhead, CEO of Tideway Systems, who will be filing his personal insights on the conference and exhibition on a daily basis.

Tideway Systems helps companies gain greater insight into their IT infrastructure and application dependencies. Richard is the brother of Charlie Muirhead who created software company Orchestream at the height of the dot.com boom. In five years Orchestream went from angel funding of £20,000 to a dual listing on Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange, and a market cap of more than £1 billion. It was later sold to Metasolv in 2002 and then Oracle in 2006.