In its first major release since licensing TS Associates’ TipOff latency measurement system a year ago, London-based infrastructure monitoring specialist Velocimetrics has unveiled a new range of high performance TipOff appliances, one of which offers more than six times the storage capacity of previous appliances. The new appliance range will also underpin future releases of Velocimetrics’ eponymous system performance monitoring systems.
The new TipOff capabilities are aimed at meeting client requests for more storage capacity, whether to help comply with more stringent regulatory requirements or to bolster testing environments for trading systems and algorithms. Top of the new range is the exceptionally high capacity V205 appliance, enabling TipOff to retain up to 24 terabytes of raw captured trading data or 160TB of compressed captured trading data on a single 2U appliance.
All the new appliances offer at least twice as much storage as their predecessors. This will allow clients to capture, store and analyse large volumes of trading data to ensure they are meeting new rules like MiFID II, due to come into force in 2017, or the Basel Committee’s emerging Fundamental Review of the Trading Book.
According to Steve Rodgers, Velocimetrics’ head of engineering and former TSA chief technology officer, some clients have already deployed the new range to aid in their compliance efforts or to extend the coverage of the test data used to analyse the performance of their trading algorithms.
The V205 appliance, in particular, will enable TipOff clients to capture more data to disk and significantly accelerate the data decode process, enabling up to 48 million market data ticks to be decoded per second ready for detailed analysis. The duration for which the data can then be stored has been extended, enabling for instance a steady 1Gbit/s (gigabit per second) stream of market data ticks to be retained for a rolling window of more than nine weeks.
Storing this volume of data has traditionally presented considerable cost issues as multiple appliances or external data retention solutions such as NAS and SAN drives have also been required. This can cause data centre fees to quickly increase due to associated hosting, power and cooling costs. The new appliance range will help clients to more effectively control these costs by consolidating the repository of much larger data volumes into a single appliance.
Rodgers says the latest release marks an important strategic step for the company’s future product development plans as the new appliance range, will also support upcoming releases of the Velocimetrics solution. This consolidated appliance platform represents a key building block in the company’s longer-term technical roadmap, he says, which aims to take the best features from each solution and build on these to more effectively address evolving industry developments and emerging client requirements.
Velocimetrics licensed TS-Associates’ technologies and hired its technical team last July, after TSA’s VC funders pulled the plug on their financing. Under the arrangement, Velocimetrics’ licensed the intellectual property rights to TipOff and Application Tap products, with a view to adding them to its own suite of network-level data flow analysis products. The deal also allowed Velocimetrics to offer on-going maintenance to TipOff and Application Tap users, and to develop and enhance these products.
This past spring, for example, Velocimetrics announced that TipOff was now able to capture network packets to disk at a sustained rate of 40 Gbps on a single 2U Appliance using the AHA374 GZIP compression/decompression card supplied by AHA Products Group. Significantly reducing the rack space and disk requirements to do so, this development was aimed at helping firms to ensure that as market volumes rise, they can capture and persist to disk up to 40 Gbps, equating to 40 million messages or market data ticks per second, on a single Appliance with 1 RAID controller.
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