Arista Networks and Solarflare announced that CBOE Holdings, home of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and other exchange subsidiaries, chose Solarflare and Arista to support next-generation technology for high frequency trading on its CBOEdirect platform.

The performance enhancements were implemented in the first quarter of 2011 for CBOE -- the largest US options exchange and creator of listed options -- and for all-electronic C2 Options Exchange, CBOE Futures Exchange and CBOE Stock Exchange.

CBOE technologists led the collaborative design effort with Arista and Solarflare to deliver significant performance enhancements to the exchanges' world-class trading platform, CBOEdirect. Arista and Solarflare's trading solutions provide a new level of network intelligence by tightly coupling applications for CBOE's network. This integration of application acceleration to the network delivers dramatic improvements in performance, bandwidth and response time to CBOE customers, offering a critical competitive edge in the rapidly evolving high frequency trading market.

"System performance and response time have always been central to CBOE's technology focus. By implementing a combination of Solarflare's and Arista's low latency, high-performance networking products, CBOE continues to provide the lowest latency experience to our customers," said Gerald O'Connell, CBOE Holdings executive vice president and chief information officer. "We're extremely pleased with the benefits -- including measurable lower latency -- delivered with these new network enhancements."

"Over the past three years, the Arista 7100 Series has become the gold standard in ultra-low latency trading for clients, market makers, and exchanges and Arista is proud to be the network partner for CBOE's options exchange," stated Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO at Arista Networks. "With the lowest latency switches available, application integration of active latency monitoring with LANZ and Solarflare, and self-healing EOS, Arista's industry leadership is demonstrated in every part of real-world financial trading deployments."

Arista's networking portfolio provides the lowest latency possible with Ethernet switches today, while providing the necessary protocol and forwarding support to peer at the world's major trading venues such as BGP, OSPF, MLAG, and PIM-SM. With Arista's LANZ integration, congestion events are actively monitored in real-time and this data is integrated with trading platforms and network management solutions to improve the client trading experience.

"We're honored to be working closely with two market leaders to deliver a solution for CBOE Holdings' exchanges," said Russell Stern, CEO at Solarflare. "Our application-aware server I/O solutions are uniquely positioned to address CBOE's requirements for capacity, scale-out performance and low latency. We look forward to a long-term relationship with CBOE and our partner Arista Networks to continue to deliver value to CBOE's customers."

Solarflare's networking hardware and software products provide a flexible, direct model for accelerating applications while maintaining support for the network and operating system functions required by enterprises. These scalable server I/O solutions enable customers to match network parameters and resources, such as performance, bandwidth and response time, to specific business needs. The company's products are built on standard protocols, including Ethernet, TCP/IP, UDP and PCIe, and are compatible with existing network infrastructure. This protocol conformance and application transparency enables customers to seamlessly adopt and deploy Solarflare's solutions without re-writing any applications.