Cisco Systems on Monday partnered with Reuters and Sun Microsystems to create a low-latency platform for automated financial trading.

The platform consists of Reuters' Market Data System -- a direct exchange feed system that powers automated trading applications in the financial industry -- installed on Sun Microsystems' rack-mount server with integrated dual-core Intel Xeon processor, and Cisco's InfiniBand server fabric switches running on the Solaris 10 operating system.

Cisco's server fabric switches can be used for connecting servers together into grids of compute resources.

The companies made their pitch on Monday during the High Performance on Wall Street conference in New York. The event focuses on high performance computing technologies such as clustered networks, grid computing and advanced server designs. Several factors have emerged in helping companies combat network latency including the advent of dual-core and quad-core processor technology, virtualization frameworks, enhanced server fabric switches, and optimized operating systems.

The advances in technology are a boost to financial services companies who are trying to overcome network latency problems and cope with industrywide regulations such as Reg NMS (Regulation for National Markets) for the U.S. capital markets and MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) for the capital markets in the European Union.

"The continued growth of algorithmic trading, combined with regulations such as Reg NMS and MiFID, require capital markets companies to look for the best IT infrastructure and applications possible," said Krish Ramakrishnan, VP and GM of Cisco's Server Virtualization Business Unit.

The Cisco/Intel/Sun platform offers high throughput, low latency, and high efficiency necessary for trading and pricing applications. The platform can be deployed without re-architecting or upgrading traditional front-office infrastructure; instead front-office infrastructure can be used as a secondary data source, Cisco said.

The companies' goal is to help financial services firms increase their data volumes with lowest possible latency. Tests performed by Sun Microsystems showed that the platform helped reduce latency in trading systems by up to 38%.