Quants on wall street: Revenge of the nerds
I borrowed the headline above from the title of an interview at Yahoo! Finance today featuring Scott Patterson, the author of a new book called The Quants. His book tells the story of how mathematics took over trading on Wall Street.
I haven’t read the book yet (just downloaded on Kindle), but based on the teaser text at Amazon, I was disappointed to see that the author felt the need to tie his already interesting topic into the current financial malaise. The jacket text suggests he is blaming the quants for the 2008-2009 financial crisis. This will probably sell more books, but is an intellectually simplistic/sensationalistic/lazy argument in my opinion. I will reserve full judgment until I have read the book though.
Amazing how being anti-anything seems to be the preferred approach in books, newspapers and TV appearances these days.
Why power reduction goals are hard to meet
Every firm is concerned about power, but the problem continues to spiral out of control. Here’s a typical scenario that describe why things are the way they are:
The CIO makes what looks like the right declaration: “We WILL reduce power, no matter what”. Then good, honest projects come along that boost the top or bottom line and become exceptions to the “no matter what” part of the edict.
It is well documented that CIOs tend to last 2-3 years, and a typical IT worker will outlive several CIOs. Through time, these declarations take on the flavor of The Who’s immortal observation — meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Go on, click and waste the few minutes listening to vintage era Who. You know you want to, and it’s more energizing than drinking 2 cups of coffee. Not only that, but it immediately erases the memory of their Superbowl performance.
The best way we have seen to get the foot soldiers aligned with management objectives is to tie a meaningful piece of their compensation to it. Then everyone is aligned to find a way to make both kinds of “green” (more money and less power) happen. The good news is when half your annual pay is tied to anything, it becomes your focus. The bad news is this only works in financial services where bonuses are large enough to motivate. Having half of a government workers 10% bonus tied to power usage won’t change anyone’s behavior. They will become a bigger star, and get a bigger raise for delivering better or faster than they will for delivering cheaper.
Want a truly green datacenter? Turn off the servers.
You may hate the hype about “Green IT” as much as I do, but the problem it addresses is very real so don’t expect the term to go away anytime soon. There are some interesting stats on how out of control datacenter sprawl is getting in this article in eWeek Europe.
In 2020, data centres worldwide will consume about 450 billion kWh and their CO2 emissions (at about 330 million tones) will be equal to those of Portugal, Switzerland, Greece and Sweden combined. Their electricity bills will amount to nearly $45 billion (£26bn).
The demand for computing is always growing, so the only practical way to get more green is to do more work per watt.
This is a big reason why many customers are rolling out Solace technology. We generally get in the door on speeds and feeds, but we get picked and purchased based on our ability to reduce costs and shrink the datacenter. One Solace message router can replace the work being done by 10-30 servers running software-based messaging middleware, while using the power equivalent to about 1.5 servers, a power savings of 85-95%. That’s just power, remember, and doesn’t even reflect other cost-efficiencies like a smaller datacenter footprint and reductions in software licenses, software maintenance, linux maintenance contracts, and the server hardware itself.
It’s a win for everybody: faster applications for the operations teams and lower costs for the pencil pushers. Software-based middleware can’t demonstrate these results, and in fact is one of the key drivers of the “server sprawl” problem because scaling a software-based solution means splitting the work across more cores, more machines, etc.
The server vendors will forever push replacement cycles with a 10-15% more efficient machine, but it seems pretty clear that the most effective green strategy is finding ways to decommission the server racks altogether.
We’re bringing sexy (to the) back (office)
For the last few decades, from the early days of Gordon Gekko and Liar’s Poker to today’s focus on hedge funds and high frequency trading, the sex appeal has clearly centered around the front office. The press loves to write about it and we love to read about it. Every trade is like the proverbial iceberg, though — the trading decision is what everyone sees, but the majority of work happens in the murky waters below the surface where the considerably less sexy mid-and-back-office operations occur.
Last week Greg MacSweeney wrote a good article in Wall Street and Technology highlighting the back office as a new battleground for efficiency. After years of chasing zero latency for the front-office, the back office is comparatively archaic and badly in need of updating.
Read more
Come See us at TCIP 2010
For the next few days our government team will be immersed in the world of emergency messaging and alerting at the Technologies for Critical Incident Preparedness conference in Philadelphia. We’ll be in booth #505, so please stop by if you’re in the neighborhood.
We look forward to discussing the announcements we made last week (DHS/DNDO as a customer, Thermo Fisher as a partner, and our new geospatial routing capability) and seeing what else is hot in the world of information exchange and critical incident preparedness.
In addition, we’ll be participating in a demonstration designed to show off how a range of technologies can help authorities manage a multi-faceted critical incident. In the scenario, an ammonia leak is detected in the Philadelphia Flyers’ arena shortly before game time, just as a severe weather front is moving into town. The scenario includes the routing of alerts and information as citizens are notified about the situation and given appropriate instructions depending on their location, hazmat teams are dispatched to the site of the ammonia leak, injured parties are sent to the best hospital for treatment, a tornado warning is issued, and more. The scenario includes practices and protocols such as geospatial routing, Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), Emergency Alert System (EAS), DM-OPEN, EDXL, Commercial Mobile Alerts System (CMAS) and EDXL Hospital Availability Exchange (HAVE). It should be an impressive display of the kind of information sharing being streamlined through the efforts of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).