TS-Associates’ Tipoff Monitors Middleware for Latency Issues
From A-Team Group’s Market Data Insight, May 2007: Assuring the latency of the market data infrastructure supporting an electronic trading system is as low as it is says on the tin is becoming a key element of financial institutions’ performance measurement of their high-performance systems.
London-based market data systems specialist Trading Systems Associates says it has sold 25 instances of its new Tipoff middleware analysis appliance, which monitors the performance of market data platforms like Reuters Market Data System, Tibco Rendezvous and 29West LatencyBusters Middleware (LBM).
According to Henry Young, TSAssociates’ director of product development, Tipoff is in production at a global deployment of 21 appliances at a major U.S. investment bank. The system is also being used by a major European investment and retail bank, with three appliances, with a final system deployed at the Securities Technology Analysis Centre, in Chicago, run by TBD Corp.
Moreover, the system is about to enter evaluations at a global financial institution seeking to measure the high-resolution passive latency of its direct exchange feed infrastructures. Young says Tipoff represents the amalgamation of all the experience accumulated by TS-Associates over the last eight years in building data capture and analysis solutions for real time middleware stacks.
Using FPGA (field-programmable gate array)-accelerated capture cards and high-performance 64-bit multi-core processors, the system is capable of capturing, decoding and analyzing over one million messages per second. Its primary uses are to gauge latency at all points throughout a network set-up and to analyze who is sending what to whom and how quickly across the network.
The system’s core capabilities include analysis of middleware operating statistics, monitoring passive latency, validating application behaviour, measuring infrastructure utilization and capacity planning. TS-Associates guarantees real-time packet capture, protocol decode and middleware analysis at gigabit wire speed. Tipoff decodes middleware protocols from the wire with no reliance on middleware vendor APIs or daemon processes.
Young says a vitally important design aim is that, in order to monitor and analyze the operation of a middleware environment, there should be no dependency on any component of that middleware product. He adds that because it uses hardware accelerated capture technology that guarantees zero packet loss, Tipoff is not exposed to the kind of data loss experienced by regular server grade network interfaces. As such, it is able to yield a complete analysis of network events, such as multicast storms or micro bursts, without adding latency and causing data losses that can trigger such problems in the first place, Young says.
This ‘passive’ characteristic of Tipoff is a key attribute. Young says that the system is the only one of its kind that he’s aware of that is able to monitor network events in real time without effectively becoming the network’s largest single consumer application of market data, which adds latency to the overall network.
Tipoff is delivered as a purpose built rack mount appliance. It comprises a high-performance multi-processor motherboard, RAID disk storage, multiple gigabit network adapters, specialist gigabit capable packet capture hardware and FPGA-based hardware acceleration with optimized firmware, Young says.
