Financial services firms dealing with lost millions due to a few milliseconds of network latency measured should get a rise out of a new high-speed solution that marries ultra-fast data transmission and revved up transaction processing.

The solution comes courtesy of Mellanox and GigaSpaces, which have combined the 40 Gbps ConnectX network adapter with the eXtreme Application Platform. The integrated solution pushes latency down to 0.4 ms, including synchronous data replication to a backup server, and drives more than 8,000 transactions per second using 4k objects.

The system uses the InfiniBand data protocol, which provides lossless communications even during a failure, although it can also run four lossy 10 GbE services through Mellanox' Virtual Protocol Interconnect format.

With the XAP platform, users have the ability to predictably scale systems to suit peak demands through automatic adjustment of processing capability to suit rising and falling data loads, a key capability for firms that have begun to outsource infrastructure resources to the cloud.