Many global companies, especially in the front office of capital markets, have a strategic need to send real-time data from one location to another, often thousands of miles away, over a Wide Area Network (or WAN) connection.
With foreign exchange, for example, global investment banks send dealable streaming prices, orders, trades, and reference data across the WAN.
But WAN connections restrict the free flowing and ultra-fast delivery of real-time data that FX and other electronic trading applications – inside the firewall – have come to expect. In particular, latency, throughput, and reliability are often problem areas with streaming data. And for trades and other types of permanent data, some applications need the assurance of guaranteed messaging over the WAN, which vastly increases complexity and cost. On top of all that, if a WAN link fails, this often means an outage until the routing process can be re-configured and re-started to use a different path.
This set of front office technology challenges has become a major choke point in FX and other electronic trading applications, and is a latent threat for IT departments seeking faster access to true real-time data. The growth of data in volume and velocity is outpacing the rate of increase of available WAN bandwidth, and that trend is likely to continue.
Clearly, the enterprise architect or global head of FX trading needs a way to do more with limited WAN resources, especially when viewed in combination with relentless pressure of more and more data moving faster and faster (a “Big Data” issue).
Informatica’s Dynamic Routing Option, available with Ultra Messaging, is built to meet all of these needs with automatic best path selection with hot/hot failover, guaranteed messaging over the WAN, and intelligent filtering and topic management to minimize bandwidth. For WAN links that support multicast, you can use multicast to avoid TCP-induced “fairness” slowdowns caused by slow receivers and limited bandwidth. And for businesses that mandate IT real-time initiatives for the future, the Ultra Messaging Dynamic Routing Option positions your business to meet those goals.
