How PC Blades Will Rescue Wall Street

In addition to the natural stress of handling massive amounts of other people’s money, financial traders may encounter other forms of stress on the job. It’s hardly relaxing to work at a desk cluttered with multiple box PCs, each computer whirring away and radiating heat while you’re trying to execute million-dollar trades.

Antone Gonsalves explains in InformationWeek that traders often need multiple monitors with full-motion video to keep their eye on “broadcasts from Reuters, Bloomberg, and other news agencies, watching for events that could have an impact on financial markets.”
As a result, personnel at large financial institutions are often forced to tolerate extreme heat and noise. In fact, the employees of one large firm — a customer of ours prior to their deploying blades — actually developed heat rashes on their legs when a row of desktops started running too hot. They started unplugging their computers, which, of course, sent a technician flying into the room to plug the machines back in.

Many financial services companies end up turning to centralized computing to counteract these ergonomic issues. The heat and the noise stay in the data center, and a paperback-sized client port replaces the PC at the trader’s desk. Old configurations of the ClearCube PC Blade could only support multi-monitor setups through short-distance direct cabling. However, our partnership with Teradici now allows us to support up to four monitors per blade, without onerous distance considerations.

This IT Week article explains how some technology has overcome distance limitations but has failed to address the multi-monitor question:

“Newer IP-based kit allows users to be more distant but does not support multiple displays. ‘There is also a requirement for low latency by traders and this can’t be met with RDP over IP,’ [Paul Dunford, ClearCube’s European director of partnerships and alliances] said.”

ClearCube’s I9400 series user ports and PC Blades provide an extremely high-quality user experience with decreased latency and better graphics rendering, at distances far beyond what was previously possible. That makes it an excellent fit for the demands of the financial services industry.