Advanced Trading - Analytische Datenbanken für Finanzdienstleister

ADVANCED TRADING Three rules for success can provide a critical advantage in the race to zero latency. Winning the Race to Zero Deutsche Börse Group, one of the world’s leading financial exchanges, recently developed a new ultra-low-latency trading infrastructure linking Frankfurt to five other key worldwide trading centers. The target for the Frankfurt-London link was 5 milliseconds (0.005 seconds). Pushing the limits of how quickly computers can process instructions is the new battleground in finance. True zero latency may be mathematically impossible, but as technology continually shatters the benchmarks of the past—moving transaction speeds from milliseconds to microseconds (millionths of a second) and even to nanoseconds (billionths of a second)—it is quickly closing the gap. Today, the industry average for a typical pre-trade risk check is about 125 microseconds (0.000125 seconds) and getting faster all the time. Irfan Khan Vice President and You don’t achieve such exponential performance Chief Technology Officer, breakthroughs by doing things the same way you Sybase, an SAP Company CAPITAL MARKETS GUIDE I 13 always did. And yet, nobody in the financial achieve their performance services industry has the luxury of being able objectives. Faster hardware to rip and replace their mission-critical systems. arranged in an efficient, Today’s environment requires a new set of rules. modular architecture will surely be part of every firm’s “race to Rule 1: Build on your existing systems to minimize zero” strategy, but hardware business disruptions. alone can’t do the job. Compromising existing applications or structural At its root, optimization is a components may be the fastest route to a big software problem, but even the step up in performance, but that approach is a most advanced, highly parallelized nonstarter. The systems in use at today’s firms processing engine is limited The race to zero will be won by companies that are willing to harness the beauty and benefits of hardware and software simultaneously. are well defined, secure and highly leveraged. by the hardware on which it Companies need an additive approach—one that is deployed. A system that can will leverage their existing investments and process 1 million messages per prevent disruptions to the business while second is still operating at only making it easy to introduce new components 50 percent of its true potential that will shave latency from transaction times. if it isn’t deployed on multi-core servers with distributed Hardware and Software in Parallel. What management. The race to zero companies can’t do is rely solely on off-the-shelf will be won by companies that products or routine data center upgrades to are willing to harness the beauty 14 I SYBASE 2011 ADVANCED TRADING When hardware and software are considered in unison, the sky is the limit. and benefits of hardware and operate with maximum speed and reliability. software simultaneously. It is a specialist infrastructure intended to meet the specific high-performance requirements of Rule 2: Use accelerative hardware capital markets firms. Despite being a relatively and software in strategic new technology, such trading appliances can combination. deliver astonishing results in raw processing performance, which ultimately extends the Finance’s new real-time boundaries of trading volumes. requirements are fueling a cottage industry: boutique These vendors are approaching the challenge technology vendors intensely much like a Formula One racing team. Naturally, focused on addressing the the engine of an elite racing car must be designed ultra-low-latency problem for high performance, rapid acceleration and through innovation. And, not sustained high speeds. But these innovations surprisingly, they are doing cannot be fully realized if the auto chassis creates this precisely by crossing the drag, or if the fuel grade or the tires are inferior. hardware-software chasm. When the right choices are made on the outside, the engine is liberated from hurdles that would Solace Systems and 29 West constrain its performance. (recently acquired by Informatica) are among the leaders in Similarly, when hardware and software are this boutique industry. These considered in unison, the sky is the limit. companies have embedded high-performing silicon-based High performance is its own reward, but optimization systems on very companies must be able to achieve their specialized hardware appliances ultra-low-latency goals without causing any designed to let the software disruption to the business (see Rule 1). That’s CAPITAL MARKETS GUIDE I 15 why valuable market innovations such as trading important facet of NGIP. By appliances conform to today’s best practices for using the cloud, NGIP will distributed platform architecture. satisfy a firm’s growing demands for event-driven Rule 3: Adopt a next-generation platform processing at lightning speeds. architecture to harness complexity and minimize It also enables the flexibility to latency. support whatever application- or data-tier innovations the To achieve ultra-low latency without compromising firm elects to invest in. existing systems, companies need a platform strategy that can achieve massive scale-out for Leading trading firms rely data analytics and massive scale-up for extreme heavily on news and event data transactional environments. The Next Generation streams while also tracking Information Platform (NGIP) is such a strategy. trade history and price NGIP inherits from innovations across the data- fluctuations. As a result, the centric set of IT components: Faster processors volume of complex event and a larger number of cores, larger memory, data that automated trade High performance is its own reward, but companies must be able to achieve their ultra-low-latency goals without causing any disruption to the business. faster interconnects and so forth all play a role in systems must analyze is massive. allowing applications to scale better. The key to managing this data volume is to perform resource- Macro technology trends, such as memory-centric intensive computations in firms’ computing and cloud computing, are another private cloud environments so 16 I SYBASE 2011 ADVANCED TRADING NGIP’s cloud-centric approach means firms can obtain the computing power they need quickly and painlessly. that transactions and analytics allowing high-volume messages (beyond 1 million occur quickly and efficiently. messages per second is the new standard for fund NGIP’s cloud-centric approach managers) to flow at near-zero latency—without means firms can obtain the disrupting downstream heritage systems. computing power they need quickly and painlessly. Toward Zero Latency Getting to near-zero latency isn’t trivial, especially in Using the cloud doesn’t mean light of today’s aggressive requirements for collection, giving up control: With NGIP storage and analysis of complex data.