Market Data Distribution

“Everything you want in life has a price connected to it.”
- Harry Browne

Business Challenge

Information is the lifeblood of the financial services industry. Who has access to it, how fast they can get it, and how effectively it is shared directly translates to competitiveness and in turn profitability. By contrast, when information stops flowing, a firm can lose more money in a few minutes than it makes in weeks. For many years, high data volumes and limited network bandwidth led firms to adopt a multicast-based distribution architecture, despite ongoing concerns over operational risks and poor suitability to wide area distribution. Improvements in price and performance of networks now allow TCP-based distribution of real-time content with low, consistent latency and without the many risks associated with multicast architectures.

When distribution includes wide-area networks, managing information flow is particularly challenging. Redundant information is often forwarded over high cost, low-speed links and speed difference between IP network segments can wreak havoc on system latency and throughput.

Solution Summary

Solace’s content networking system combines advanced networking technology with financial middleware to allow fast and efficient data fan-out from content sources to any number of applications or users. Unlike software solutions, Solace uses specialized hardware to maximize performance and minimize variables that can impact latency and predictability.

Solace distributes content over TCP connections eliminating security issues, broadcast storms, slow receiver problems and network speed mismatches that can wreak havoc within today’s multicast-based content distribution networks. Using TCP rather than multicast also means that client applications receive only the information they need, rather than receiving and filtering all messages from multicast groups, thereby freeing up precious CPU resources within trading or other applications. 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 specific interest to a subscriber is forwarded at all thanks to filtering that occurs in high-speed hardware at the ingress of the network assuring no wasted network resources. 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 many benefits over traditional approaches:

  • Improved system reliability — Distributing content using TCP eliminates all of the problems associated with multicast. Solace’s use of TCP allocates network resources fairly across users and isolates misbehaving users from the others, thereby removing the risk that one slow subscriber or a bandwidth mismatch on LAN segments will cause cascading problems for all other users. Elimination of network congestion and reduced downtime results in reduced opportunity for business losses and lower operating costs.
  • Improved management — Solace’s unique hardware blades can track detailed statistics with no impact on throughput or latency of messages. Solace provides operating transparency to easily find slow consumers, unusual network behavior, distribution link failures and other problems that have plagued software middleware management.
  • Improved security — policies to allow/disallow certain clients from publishing certain content and to allow/disallow other clients from receiving certain content can be centrally administered.
  • 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, less datacenter power and cooling and less manpower required to operate, patch and maintain racks of servers. Distribution is delivered as a single integrated hardware, operating system and middleware combination.
  • Increased client machine efficiency — Client machines only receive the information they have subscribed to and therefore do not need to receive each multicast packet and filter unwanted messages. Client devices are also not subjected to processing retransmissions resulting from other slow clients and network speed mismatches, thereby providing more processing isolation and improved application performance.
  • Increased flexibility – Solace content routers provide much more than fast, reliable content distribution. The same content routers use hardware approaches to set new performance standards in high-speed messaging, persistent messaging, content routing, content transformation and more. Solace’s content networking system delivers a single platform equally suitable for LAN or WAN with best-in-class performance, simplified management and 24×7 resiliency for all middleware needs.