HP Hardware Collaboration at High Speed

Posted on June 5th, 2008

An early supporter of Intel’s initiative to establish the fasterLAB was HP – providing hardware and partner products to build out the environment.

You can’t get far away from HP in trading. Buy-side firms, major investment banks, and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) run on HP servers and they are all looking for more speed, more power in a smaller footprint with reduced energy consumption.

TABBGroup’s Bob Iata was quoted in Advanced Trading saying that HP is the vendor of choice going forward on Wall Street.

“HP is the only major server vendor we see growing in this market, HP has won the war,” said Iati.

To get to that position, and stay there, HP works closely with the Intel fasterLAB in London, while engineering staffs from the two companies maintain close contact in the U.S. In fasterLAB, HP and Intel collaborate to tune and optimize the LSE’s TradElect application to meet the demands on the marketplace. This Collaboration extends to their mutual clients & ISV partnerships.

“A lot of the business HP does in financial service in the UK is directed to the investment banking community,” says Paul Kember, sales director at HP for the UK financial services industry. Once a rack market, financial services is increasingly looking to the features and flexibility of blades, and HP has met the demand for high power in tight quarters, where limited opportunity to bring in more electricity means its BladeSystem c-Class architecture which can run Intel’s latest power-efficient processors has highly relevant and attractive features.

The City of London has some real power issues. The c-Class blade servers reduce power consumption by 15-20 percent, said Jon Buxton, HP Pre-Sales Consulting, while allowing increased density. “We actively manage the power workload on all the blades we deploy,” said Buxton.

“We are supportive with Intel in top to bottom initiatives with other important partners such as Mellanox, Voltaire and Cisco in the high speed interconnect environment,” adds Kember. “We work very closely with the Intel account teams to identify customers who would benefit from time with Intel engineers in the lab to fine tune their stack. We invest in equipment for the Intel lab on an ongoing basis, ensuring that this program backs up the client and partner dialogue of our respective teams. Today, with the emphasis on optimisation of infrastructure – where Intel and HP play - our working relationship with Intel is closer (and more effective) than it ever has been before.”

HP is also working with RMDS at Reuters and Wombat at NYSE Euronext. No surprises – both are looking for faster market data which requires faster connections, tuning and integration of the surrounding services. The hardware vendors are catalysing the trading ecosystem.