ACADEMIA

Foundry Networks announced today that Lava Trading Inc., a leading developer of high-performance trading solutions for the financial services industry, has deployed Foundry's ServerIron(R) 400 Layer 4-7 load balancing switches to increase capacity and availability of its high-performance financial trading system. Lava's trading technology is used by most of the top 20 U.S. investment banks, and processes an average of 300+ million shares per day. Lava has facilitated the trading of one hundred billion shares in just over three years of operation and has earned the business of many of Wall Street's largest firms because of the speed, intelligence and reliability of its trading solutions. "The power of a trading system will help or hinder a trader in getting better pricing. We are highly regarded by so many Wall Street firms because of our ability to execute orders with unparalleled speed and accuracy," said Charles Allen, COO, Lava Trading Inc. "Adding Foundry's powerful and intelligent load balancing solution to our infrastructure will help our system continue to deliver this extremely high level of performance as we grow, allowing us to scale gracefully with high reliability, and to keep well ahead of our customers' requirements." Lava's patented technology was the first in the industry to truly consolidate market data distribution and order execution capabilities across all major liquidity sources -- providing traders with a panoramic view of both Nasdaq and Listed markets. Lava's products are created as true ASP solutions built to withstand maximum volumes in the most volatile trading conditions. Lava installed Foundry ServerIron 400 load balancing switches at its data centers on the East Coast, critical points in the delivery of Lava's real-time market data and trade execution services. Using the ServerIron systems, Lava will be able to virtualize the server farm and trading application infrastructure for its clients. Virtual server farm greatly simplifies connectivity management, increases application availability and shortens service turn up, which in turn improves the end client experience. The ServerIron solution also will help Lava improve availability by automating and fortifying its system for ensuring transparent failover, which keeps traders connected no matter what conditions may exist at its server farms. "After rigorous testing, we chose the Foundry solution because it offered us the best capacity and resiliency and an elegant, easy-to-use interface," said Tom Case, director of network technology for Lava. "Lava is all about speed, performance, and resiliency. To successfully meet the needs of our customers, we need to be able to execute quickly and seamlessly react to any network issues. Foundry definitely raised the bar for performance and was also very responsive in meeting Lava's specific business goals by providing timely solutions to technology requirements." Ultimately, the addition of ServerIron 400 switches to Lava's infrastructure will help the company keep pace with a rising volume and variety of trades from its growing customer base and support the company's move to expand its services portfolio to address new markets, such as foreign exchange. ServerIron Layer 4-7 load balancing switches were designed to support precisely this type of application, where 24x7 performance and reliability are critical. Foundry's ServerIron switches are the industry leaders in security, performance and intelligence, providing sophisticated Internet traffic and content switching features including server load balancing, URL and cookie based switching, global server load balancing, firewall load balancing and transparent cache switching. Some of the world's most demanding customers such as AOL TimeWarner, CheckFree Corporation, NTT DoCoMo, and Wachovia Bank rely on Foundry ServerIron systems for server farm scalability and network security.