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Equinix, provider of network-neutral data centres and internet exchange services, has extended its Financial eXchange community in Europe with the addition of Chi-X Europe. Launched to help institutional investors achieve ultra low latency execution, Chi-X Europe is an order-driven pan-European alternative trading system. It will take advantage of Equinix’s premium data centre services and Financial eXchange approach to ensure the optimum performance and ultra low latency response times for its solution, according to Equinix. Chi-X Europe will join more than 40 other European customers that have already relocated their systems within Equinix’s network of Financial eXchange hubs to take advantage of the company’s proximity capabilities, the vendor claims.

Equinix News Release

Technorati Tags: Equinix, Financial eXchange, Chi-X Europe, proximity hosting

Xasax Corporation has chosen technology from FalconStor Software, provider of disk-based data protection solutions, to enable it to offer ultra low latency financial market data to active trader and financial services organisations. The FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS), powered by the FalconStor IPStor platform, provides storage virtualisation and provisioning services, via industry standard iSCSI protocol, over a 20 Gb/s InfiniBand storage area network, supplied by Voltaire. Xasax, whose clients include active traders, hedge funds, and other financial services organisations, provides market data, order routing, entitlement solutions and proximity hosting services. The blended FalconStor, Xasax and Voltaire technologies give traders access to high-speed order execution; large, high-performance data stores; and trade management capabilities that were previously unavailable to the middle market, the vendors claim.

Voltaire News Release

Technorati Tags: FalconStor, Xasax Corporation, Voltaire, InfiniBand, storage virtualisation

GL Trade, provider of integrated software solutions to international financial institutions, has signed an agreement with the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) that will allow the delivery of a complete ASP infrastructure connecting TASE members to the majority of financial marketplaces worldwide, while also enabling them to receive and execute orders from any country on the exchange from April 2008 onwards. GL Trade’s combined execution and ultra low latency data feed service will be launched in association with TASE.

GL Trade News Release

Technorati Tags: Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange, TASE, GL Trade, ultra low latency data

Interactive Data Corporation’s Real-Time Services business has expanded its geographical reach with a new point of presence (POP) located in Stockholm, Sweden. The new POP provides a local access point designed to provide Interactive Data’s Scandinavian client base with significantly improved performance, regardless of data volume or market conditions. It can also offer cost benefits as customers will be able to connect to the low latency PlusFeed service locally via leased line or co-location of equipment. The connectivity between Interactive Data’s core network and the new POP can allow the entire PlusFeed dataset - including extensive order book content - to be made available locally in Scandinavia, with additional headroom available for future growth in data volumes.

Technorati Tags: Interactive Data Corporation, Interactive Data Corporation’s Real-Time Services, point of presence, POP, PlusFeed, order book content

Currenex has been added as a market centre on the Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI) from NYSE TransactTools, a subsidiary of NYSE Euronext. Through SFTI’s high availability and low latency network, customers are able to receive market data and trade on Currenex using TCP/IP, XML and FIX. Currenex, which was acquired by State Street earlier this year (Electronic Trading, February 2007) provides execution technology and access to liquidity for banks, corporations, hedge funds and other active trading firms in the foreign exchange markets. Created in 2002, SFTI is the resilient, low latency communications backbone dedicated to the financial industry. It offers connectivity to NYSE as well as other exchanges, market centres and content services providers, including all of the National Market System markets in the US, and also connects to more than 800 market participants including Liffe, the international derivatives business of NYSE Euronext, which joined the service earlier this year (Electronic Trading, October 2007).

TransactTools News Release

Technorati Tags: Currenex, Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure, SFTI, NYSE TransactTools, NYSE Euronext, Liffe, FIX

Euronext and Liffe say their new high capacity trading services have been well received among their customers. Liffe has received orders from more than 60 customers for dual 100Mbps connectivity and orders from in excess of 20 customers for its purpose-built co-location facility, both services which will be available from Q2 2008. Euronext has received orders from more than 20 customers for dual 100Mbps connectivity available from January 2008 and its co-location offering will be made available to customers by the end of Q1 2008. The new 100Mbps broadband access will enable customers to benefit from high speed access to both market data and order entry on Euronext and Liffe markets, to match constantly increasing order flow and market data volumes.

Euronext News Release

Technorati Tags: Euronext, Liffe, co-location, 100Mbps broadband access, market data volumes

Equinix, provider of network-neutral data centres and internet exchange services, has extended its network of Equinix Financial eXchange communities to include London and Paris. These two new locations join Equinix’s existing communities in Chicago, Frankfurt and New York, and will provide financial organisations with secure, reliable and low latency connectivity to global financial trading centres as well as a platform for community members to interconnect with each other and multiple service providers.

Technorati Tags: Equinix, network-neutral data centres, internet exchange services

STAC has released a study of latency on HP c-Class Blade Servers with Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and Voltaire InfiniBand. The system used Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) 6, running on HP BL460c Blades with 2 x Dual Core Intel Xeon 5160 3.0 GHz processors and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4. STAC investigated latency on Gigabit Ethernet versus Voltaire InfiniBand using a traditional RMDS topology in an identical system environment. It also tested a stacked RMDS topology that maximised the utilisation of cores while also taking into consideration factors in real customer deployments.

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The International Securities Exchange has launched a colocation service, providing ultra low latency connectivity to ISE’s options and stock exchanges. With the colocation service, ISE member firms will be able to place their trading hardware in the same building as ISE’s data centre, which will facilitate network transit times of less than 200 microseconds.

ISE News Release

Technorati Tags: International Securities Exchange, ISE, colocation, network transit times,

Low latency technology provider Wombat is running a fully subscribed pilot of a new middleware solution which it claims enables ultra high performance messaging with minimal data centre resource consumption.

The vendor reckons it has proven the power of Wombat Data Fabric and its ability to provide market-leading density on open, standard x86 hardware by running a full data from OPRA, the US options market, on a single Intel-based server available in a single rack unit (1U) form factor. In the test using a full day of OPRA data, the OPRA feed handler, running on a two socket eight core Intel 5400 Xeon server, published all updates on all symbols to MAMA clients across a single Voltaire network switch. Average CPU utilisation was just 10 per cent, escalating to less than 35 per cent at peaks, with a mean latency of less than 100 microseconds. No speciality or proprietary hardware devices, such as FPGA cards, are required by the solution, reducing cost and complexity when compared with alternative “appliance” approaches, Wombat reckons.

Wombat News Release

Technorati Tags: Wombat, Wombat Data Fabric, OPRA, Intel, Intel 5400 Xeon server, CPU utilisation, Voltaire, Voltaire network switch