SIFMA Serves Up IT Action

By Jeff Feinman

June 11, 2008 —  Although market data and trading were the main topics of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Technology Management Conference, IT providers had plenty of opportunity to shine at the event. SIFMA set up multiple exhibition halls at the Hilton Hotel in New York City today, and companies of all sizes filled booths to talk up new products and issues facing the financial securities industry.

Cluster solutions provider Appro showed off some of its Xtreme-X1 architecture that groups servers into what the company calls scalable units that can be managed as a stand-alone computer. Along with ice cream to draw event-goers in, Appro put an emphasis on coolness by talking about its Direct Airflow cooling configuration that racks mounts back-to-back to take advantage of under-floor cooling and having the equipment cooled directly.

Privilege password management company Cloakware was trying to boast its data center password management products. Company executives said they find that most organizations don’t have an automated mechanism for managing passwords, which results in compliance audit failures and data breaches. Cloakware’s product can protect an organization’s critical data, network infrastructure, routers and switches, the company said.

IBM showed off its IBM System z10 mainframe along with its iDataPlex Web 2.0 server design, which was released in January. IBM said that iDataPlex powers social networks and online gaming sites, and it doubles the number of servers that can run in a single IBM rack, while using less power.

Speaking about the financial industry, Ross Waitman, an IBM representative at SIFMA, said, “There are quite a few financial institutions that have their data centers in New York City, and they face the same floor space and power issues that everybody else does.”

Microsoft, meanwhile, touted some of its new entries into the financial market, along with its April acquisition of enterprise search company FAST Search and Transfer.

Sun Microsystems used the SIFMA event to talk about its energy initiatives. One of those that Sun highlighted was Project BlackBox, which it calls the first virtualized data center. Project BlackBox combines Sun’s network computing infrastructure and grid computing to reduce data center complexity and speed to deployment, the company said. Project BlackBox can be populated with 250 Sun Fire servers configured for grid computing across seven racks inside the container.

Data security company Utimaco Safeware was also present at the event, discussing its data encryption capabilities.

Tier II data center company Verari Systems was at SIFMA talking about its niche in high-performance computing and rack servers. One of the newest products from Verari is FOREST Container, which company representatives called a “data center in a box.” FOREST Container can remove density in racks and systems. “The reason we came out with that is because our systems are so dense, up to 96 servers in a rack,” said Conway Lee, a field sales engineer with Verari.



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