Ciena Expands Ultra-Low Latency Portfolio for Electronic Trading

Market momentum building as multiple global financial services firms and high-frequency traders turn to Ciena’s ultra low-latency solutions for high-performance trading infrastructure

Linthicum, MD — 09/01/2010

Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings), the network specialist, today announced an expanded portfolio of ultra low latency solutions including both 1GbE and 10GbE cards for its CN 4200® FlexSelect® Advanced Services Platform. Combining Ciena’s ultra-low latency hardware, latency-optimized optical line systems, specialized professional services and ability to provide detailed performance metrics per wavelength at all locations for proactive service management results in a fast, reliable network with unrivalled execution speed.

With the recent availability and updates to the 2RS 1GbE and Quad 10-T 10GbE cards on the CN 4200, Ciena has signed up a variety of customers for its reliable ultra-low latency solutions, ranging from a multi-billion dollar global investment banking, securities and investment management firm to multiple electronic trading firms. The customers are located in traditional global financial centers, such as New York, Chicago and London, as well as emerging trading hubs in Stockholm and Frankfurt that can now have their electronic trading strategies enabled by Ciena’s ultra-low latency solutions. This momentum underscores Ciena’s unique approach to this market that minimizes latency across the entire network and matches it with high-availability, proactive service management and professional design, management and optimization services targeted to ultra-low latency networking.

“An electronic trader could have the lowest latency trading connection in a market, but if the network is down or impaired the transaction will not go through and they lose revenue. For a risk-sensitive market that needs to capitalize on fractions of microseconds, that opportunity cost is too high,” said Dimple Amin, vice president, engineering – metro transport & enterprise, at Ciena. “Unlike competitive vendors that sacrifice reliability and performance monitoring to reduce latency, Ciena combines low latency packet-optical transport equipment and line systems with performance monitoring and specialized professional services for a comprehensive network solution that features both ultra-low latency and high-availability.”

While reducing latency in electronic trading has been dominated by server performance and exchange collocation, firms have expanded that view to now focus on the fiber transport networks between their trading engines at geographically diverse exchanges, such as those in Chicago and New York. To reduce latency and maximize reliability across those networks, Ciena’s ultra low-latency solution includes:

• Ultra low-latency transport – 2RS 1GbE and Quad 10-T 10GbE transponders for the CN 4200 to interconnect trading platforms across optical networks.

• Latency-optimized line systems – multiple options for optical amplifiers, regenerators and dispersion compensation to reduce latency across fiber spans.

• Proactive performance monitoring – intelligent software to see service performance metrics per wavelength at all locations to detect ‘soft’ failures, such as aging lasers or a pinched fiber, and quickly isolate them before they impact trade execution.

• Professional services & technical support – consultative services to design, manage and optimize networks for ultra low latency on an on-going basis, along with 24x7x365 on-site or remote network monitoring.

Continued Amin, “Our portfolio enables us to offer a solution tailored to the needs of any player in the electronic trading market, from smaller high frequency traders that are focused solely on ultra-low latency transport to global financial services firms who want the benefits of ultra-low latency combined with maximum reliability, professional services and support as their network evolves over time.”

In addition to electronic trading, Ciena’s solutions are addressing customer applications in a variety of other markets where low latency is critical to success, including synchronous data replication between data centers for business continuance, remote backup and restore, and site data migration; long-distance virtual machine migration; broadcast of HD video, and content delivery networks to create faster links between servers and customers.  Ciena’s customers in the financial services sector include Australian Stock Exchange, Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Korea Exchange and NYSE Euronext.

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