Exegy Launches Next-Generation Appliances for Market Data
ST LOUIS – 26 July 2018 – Exegy Inc., the leading provider of managed services and low-latency technology for market data normalization and distribution, has announced today the availability of its fifth generation of hardware-accelerated computing appliances for real-time market data processing. As with the introduction of prior generations of Exegy appliances, the fifth generation delivers compelling enhancements to the performance, features, and operational transparency of the low-latency Exegy Ticker Plant and enterprise-class Exegy Market Data System.
“Like each of its predecessors, the fifth-generation Exegy appliance is a game-changer,” says Chief Executive Officer James O’Donnell. “It not only delivers an immediate boost in speed and capacity, but it also deploys additional resources that enable Exegy to remotely deliver performance enhancements, compelling features, and unique content as part of our premier managed services for years to come,” adds O’Donnell.
Speed and Scale
Exegy reduced market data event latency in the fourth-generation appliance by a factor of four since its launch in the first quarter of 2015. This dramatic improvement in performance underscores the power of Exegy’s hardware-acceleration technology that allows purpose-built circuitry to be securely updated in the field. As a first example of leveraging new capabilities of the fifth-generation appliance, the August release of the flagship Exegy Ticker Plant will expand normalized data distribution capacity to up to 200 applications via TCP and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) protocols over Ethernet and InfiniBand network infrastructures. The network protocol flexibility allows the Exegy Ticker Plant to more easily integrate with diverse customer environments without sacrificing low-latency performance. The increase in distribution capacity allows the Exegy Ticker Plant to service five times the number of latency-critical applications without increasing data center footprint.
“Our proven hardware-acceleration technology in the new generation of Exegy appliance enables us to deliver quantifiable value to our customers well beyond the installation date,” says Chief Technology Officer David Taylor. “We are able to respond rapidly to market and customer demands with minimal operational risk by not altering the data center infrastructure,” adds Taylor.
Precision and Transparency
In addition to leveraging the latest server chipsets from Intel, the fifth-generation Exegy appliance features the new FPGA-based Exegy Network Interface Card (XNIC). The XNIC boosts appliance input processing capacity by over four times relative to the fourth-generation Exegy appliance. Leveraging a proprietary integration with FSMLabs TimeKeeper for clock synchronization, the XNIC assigns high-precision hardware timestamps to every data packet as “close to the wire” as possible. Timestamps are synchronized to within 20 nanoseconds of the appliance system clock, minimizing the error in measurements of single-digit microseconds event latencies. The XNIC also boosts operational transparency by performing high-precision data rate and latency measurements without impacting the latency of real-time market data. These metrics are available to a wide variety of applications via the Exegy Client API (XCAPI) and RESTful co-management interfaces of the Exegy Ticker Plant and Exegy Market Data System. “The ability to accurately measure and efficiently summarize operational metrics without deploying additional equipment or consuming additional network ports is invaluable,” says Taylor. “In addition to significantly lowering costs and complexity in the data center, it lowers operational risk by expanding the breadth and improving the quality of actionable metrics,” adds Taylor.
Commitment to Innovation
Fifth-generation Exegy appliances are already deployed to Tier 1 market participants who participated in pre-release customer trials. These trials allowed Exegy to demonstrate key features of the fifth-generation appliances such as hardware-based arbitration of multiple copies of multicast market data feeds that are delivered over diverse wireless and fiber-optic network paths. “Our long history of innovative technology and premium managed services have allowed us to develop invaluable relationships with the leading electronic trading groups in global capital markets. The successful customer trials of the new appliances are the most recent examples of constructive engagement that delivers tangible benefits to our customers and to Exegy,” says O’Donnell. The fifth-generation appliances are immediately available for new Exegy appliance deployments and upgrades to existing deployments.
About Exegy, Inc.
Exegy provides best-of-breed technology and managed services for real-time market data and trading access to a diverse set of elite firms in the financial services industry. Today Exegy serves as a strategic partner to leading exchanges, market makers, sell-side banks, buy-side asset managers, and proprietary traders. At the heart of Exegy’s product line are purpose-built, hardware-accelerated appliances derived from an extensive portfolio of patented and patent-pending technology. Exegy promotes the design of robust electronic markets through its MarketDataPeaks service that reports real-time market data feed rates. For more information, please visit www.exegy.com and follow Exegy on LinkedIn and Twitter @ExegyMarketData.
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