High-Speed Messaging
"Light speed is too slow...
we're going to have to go to ludicrous speed."
- Dark Helmet
Business Challenge
The automation of trading within capital markets has created new opportunities and new challenges for investment banking firms. At the same time, regulations such as RegNMS and MiFID are requiring transparency to assure fair competition. The result is an unprecedented growth rate in the volume of market data and a simultaneous emphasis on the lowest possible latency to assure automated systems - such as algorithmic trading - are competitive. Today’s market data infrastructures are straining under current data rates and are at risk of wholesale collapse under projected volumes. As a result, increased throughput and sometimes even full-scale network re-architectures have become a top priority within all range of market participants – investment banks, financial information providers and exchanges.
Solution Summary
Solace's content networking system embeds financial middleware functionality directly into hardware to deliver unprecedented throughput and low latency to support a wide range of financial applications. Solace uses patented FPGA, ASIC and network processor hardware technology to eliminate the bottlenecks commonly found in software, operating systems and general purpose networking interfaces.
Solace’s high-speed messaging solutions deliver consistently fast and efficient performance across local LAN segments and across bandwidth restricted global WAN links. Solace content routers are also fully networked to expand capacity horizontally and vertically to allow financial firms to stay ahead of the most extreme future requirements.
Solace’s hardware approach also allows tracking of detailed operational statistics such as queue depth, message rates, connection usage and latencies to be gathered accurately, in real-time, without any performance impact. These metrics are critical to ensuring that the overall system is operating at peak performance and for troubleshooting data flow issues.
Value to Customers
Solace’s next-generation high-speed messaging solutions deliver immediate customer value through:
- Increased competitiveness – Solace delivers performance at rates 10 to 100 times higher than equivalent software. This translates to direct competitive advantage for investment banks, exchanges, hedge funds and content service providers.
- Cost savings – A single Solace content router delivers the high-speed messaging capacity of 10 to 50 general purpose servers resulting in savings on many fronts. Less hardware to purchase and maintain, less software to license and less manpower required to operate racks of servers.
- Increased flexibility – Solace content routers provide much more than revolutionary high-speed messaging performance. The same content routers use hardware to set new performance standards in persistent messaging, content routing, content transformation and more. Solace’s content networking system delivers a single platform with best-in-class performance, simplified management and 24x7 resiliency for all middleware needs.
- Improved reliability – A single Solace content router has redundant power supplies, fans, disks and more to protect against single unit failures. Furthermore, Solace content routers can be deployed as active-active pairs that seamlessly assure continuity in the event of a single unit failure.
- Improved management – Solace’s unique network processing hardware can track detailed statistics from the network and middleware layers in hardware with no impact on throughput or latency of messages. Solace provides operating transparency to track producers/consumers usage, easily find slow consumers, isolate network faults, identify distribution link failures and provide visibility into other problems that have made management of software middleware challenging.