BLADE Network Technologies Announces sub-700 Nanosecond Latency for IP Multicast

Privately held BLADE Network Technologies announced new, low latency capabilities for its Rackswitch 10 Gigabit Ethernet platform at last week's SIFMA Financial Services Technology Expo. Primarily targeting price quotes and market data for the company's financial trading customers, the enhanced capabilities, as well as product focus, give you some idea why BLADE is hanging around when many pundits expected that larger vendors, especially one beginning with a C, would put it out of business.

One factor working in BLADE's favor right now is all the R&D invested in Carrier Ethernet forwarding capabilities, and massive memory capacity, have left a few vendors with overcooked boxes that go well beyond the needs of many data centers, which don't need to manage 300,000 route BGP4 tables like public Internet providers. This has also kept a lot of cost out of these data center switches, which are narrowly designed (vendors won't say that, but I mean it as a compliment) around latency needs, and NOT trying to handle every data networking protocol ever created.