CIARA Technologies ORION HF Servers Increase Performance by more than 70%

New ORION HF Optimized Servers Debut at ISC2013, Leipzig, Germany

Leipzig, Germany – June 16, 2013 – CIARA Technologies, global provider of Performance Computing products, technologies, software, and optimization announces today the launch and worldwide availability of the ORION HF (High Frequency) server line dedicated to the financial services industry.

These new servers deliver unparalleled performance for High Frequency Trading, Low Latency and Quantitative Investing applications. Key metrics for High-Frequency Trading are latency and computing speed, or the time it takes to actually process a trade. With the ORION HF servers, available today in dense 3U and 2U (September 2013) form factors, CIARA Technologies’ advanced hardware design and personalized firmware tuning deliver an unparalleled increase in performance ranging from 70 to 100+ per cent compared to the fastest servers from HP, DELL or IBM.

The ORION HF servers run on the latest Intel six or eight-core processors which can convert into turbo mode when required. As using the “turbo mode” creates “jitter”, something that traders want to avoid at all costs. CIARA’s proprietary design and optimization turns off all unnecessary cores and locks the remaining processor into an optimized mode, running at an unparalleled speed of 5.2GHz* on the single socket ORION HF 310 and up to 4.0GHz* for the dual Intel Xeon E5 processors ORION HF320.

“We have spent the last few years designing, developing and optimizing our overclocking technology” said Patrick Scateni, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at CIARA. “Our dedicated Performance Computing team understands applications and provides optimized solutions based upon a given environment. While other vendors are focused on proposing what is believed to be the best solution based solely on hardware cost, we concentrate our energies on extracting and delivering the maximum performance attainable with our systems for each application while maintaining a +99% uptime. Our approach and profound understanding of how software interacts with any given hardware is what has permitted us to achieve great success within the manufacturing sector and we are now applying this knowledge to the Financial Services Industry.”

“CIARA’s proven technology and optimization permit us to increase performance, lower latency, minimize “jitter” and still fully warrant the system for three years, all the while costing no more than a standard dual processor server,” said Patrick Scateni. “As an example, the Director of HFT at one of Europe’s largest banks in London reported an improvement in its application performance by more than 70 per cent over the latest HP DL380 G8.”

The ORION HF servers come in 2 system architectures:

ORION HF310

  • Single Intel® Core i7-3960X processor (up to 5.2GHz*) – Intel X79 Chipset
  • Eight 8GB DDR3 DIMM 1600, 1866 or 2133MHz
  • LSI 9211 4 Ports 6Gbps Storage Controller (RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60)
  • 4 hot-swappable hard drive bays (SATA/SSD/SAS)
  • 4 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16, 1 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x8 mode), 1 x PCIe 2.0 x1
  • Support Intel® Xeon Phi™ and NVIDIA Tesla K20C cards
  • Built-in Server management tool (BMC with IPMI 2.0, KVM/media over LAN) with dedicated LAN port
  • 770W Redundant (1+1) High Efficiency (90% – 80 Plus® Gold Certified) Power Supplies

ORION HF320

  • Dual Intel® Xeon® E5-2687W processor (up to 4.02GHz) – Intel Chipset C602
  • Eight 8GB DDR3 ECC DIMM at 1600+MHz
  • LSI 9211 4 Ports 6Gbps Storage Controller (RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60)
  • 4 hot-swappable hard drive bays (SATA/SSD/SAS)
  • 4 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16, 2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x8 mode), 1 x PCIe 2.0 x1
  • Support Intel® Xeon Phi™ and NVIDIA Tesla K20C cards
  • Built-in Server management tool (BMC with IPMI 2.0, KVM/media over LAN) with dedicated LAN port
  • 770W or 1440W Redundant (1+1) High Efficiency (90% – 80 Plus® Gold Certified) Power Supplies

The ORION HF servers also come with a standard mix of I/O ports, two Gigabit Ethernet connections, plus the choice of SolarFlare or Mellanox Low Latency Ethernet cards and the option to install the fastest PCI/Express storage SSD hard drives for customers looking at blasting IOPS and bandwidth performance.

Visit CIARA Booth 361 at ISC2013, June 16 to 19 at the Congress Center Leipzig (CCL), Leipzig, Germany. For more details on CIARA’s Financial Services solutions, visit www.ciaratech.com/OrionHF

*Speed based on customer application and after optimization by CIARA Performance Computing team.

About CIARA Technologies
CIARA is a leading global provider of IT products, technologies, software, solutions and services to small and medium sized businesses (‘‘SMBs’’), large enterprises (Top 1000) and to the public sectors including government, defense and educational entities. CIARA serves customers located in more than 60 countries across 5 continents. CIARA designs, develops, markets, and supports a variety of computer systems ranging from mobile devices to high-end supercomputers. These systems includes industry standard servers (ATLAS rack-mount or tower servers), Telco/Carrier Grade servers (ORION servers and appliances), TITAN GPU servers, the NEXXUS®C Personal Cluster, the record breaking performance overclocked KRONOS workstation and the newly released ORION High Frequency Servers. Ciara also offers a comprehensive suite of lifecycle management and OEM/ODM services, including design, engineering, manufacturing, outsourcing, integration control, global logistics and support. Founded in 1984, Ciara’s 576,000 Sqft. (53,500 M2) headquarters and primary manufacturing plant is located in Montreal, Canada and has offices across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit our website at ciaratech.com.

Contact:
CIARA Technologies
Patrick Scateni – Vice President Sales and Marketing
514-210-1735

All other brands, names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.