Market Data Distribution

"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money."
 - Senator Everett Dirksen

Business Challenge

The information provided by market data vendors is the lifeblood of the world’s financial markets. The increasing prevalence of algorithmic trading engines and their automated rule-based trades has caused an exponential increase in the volume of bids and asks in the market, and taken the need for low-as-possible latency to a whole new level. At the same time, economic conditions and financial markets are front page news, and individual investors are more able than ever to quickly make moves in their portfolio thanks to the web and mobile devices.

So market data vendors’ ability to keep information flowing fast all the time—especially in the midst of massive spikes in volume—can literally make or break them. Managing, routing and personalizing content between its source and destination is the essence of their business, and uniquely packaging that information to match customer needs can directly increase top and bottom line results as well as improve customer satisfaction.

Solution Summary

Solace’s content networking system combines advanced networking technology with content distribution middleware to allow fast and efficient data fan-out from content sources to applications and end users. Solace uses specialized hardware to maximize performance and minimize variables that can impact latency, performance, and predictability.

Solace distributes content over TCP connections which eliminates the security issues, broadcast storms, slow receiver problems, and network speed mismatches that can wreak havoc on today’s software-based content distribution networks. A single Solace content router can support thousands of direct TCP connections and multiplexes content distribution to many connections in parallel over local or wide area networks. Solace’s unique FPGA, ASIC and network processor chipsets allows content to be delivered with ultra-low latency using industry standard Ethernet.

When distributing content over wide area networks, Solace equipment automatically optimizes content fan-out to send a single message over wide area networks and then replicates the message over remote, lower-cost links. Furthermore, only content of interest to a specific subscriber is forwarded thanks to filtering that occurs in high-speed hardware at the ingress of the network. These capabilities significantly reduce costs associated with real-time distribution and scaling underlying networks to support remote applications and users.

Value to Customers

Solace’s content distribution solutions offer market data vendors many benefits:

  • Improved reliability — Distributing content over TCP eliminates the problems associated with multicast. Using TCP, Solace’s content routers allocate network resources fairly across users and isolate misbehaving users to eliminate the problems caused by one slow subscriber or a bandwidth mismatch.
  • Improved management — Solace’s hardware can track detailed statistics with absolutely no impact on throughput or latency of messages, providing operational transparency and tracking for purposes of billing, customer satisfaction, and regulatory compliance.
  • Improved security — Solace content routers enable the storage, administration, and application of entitlement policies that permit or prevent individual clients from publishing and/or receiving certain kinds of information.
  • Cost savings — A single Solace content router can handle traffic that today would require 10 to 50 general purpose servers. This means less hardware to buy and maintain, less software to license, less datacenter power and cooling, and less manpower to operate, maintain and patch racks of servers.
  • Increased flexibility — Solace’s content networking platform allows different kinds of content distribution services to be deployed on a common infrastructure. Scaling the system is as simple as adding another router.