Solace Teams with TS-Associates for Hardware-Based Latency Measurement

Solace Systems is beta testing a version of its hardware-based Unified Messaging Platform that integrates TS-Associates’ TipOff monitoring system. The solution is aimed at helping financial firms measure and optimise latency in high-performance messaging infrastructures.

Solace claims that its hardware messaging platform, which was introduced last June, is 10 to 50 times faster than software-based messaging solutions, and can handle 20 times the capacity of solutions based on Java Message Service (JMS) software.

TS-Associates’ TipOff is non-invasive and does not add traffic and potential latency to the network. Instead, it captures Solace packet traffic and measures latency from the point where applications such as market data feeds, feed handlers and algorithmic trading engines hand off data to or from the Solace platform.

Integrated together, the hardware products should allow Solace users to pinpoint sources of end-to-end latency and reduce them using TipOff’s latency root cause and middleware diagnostic capabilities.

According to Solace chief technology officer, Shawn McAllister, “With latency and uptime both critical to financial firms, the after-the-fact or limited insight provided by software is unacceptable. In addition to the messaging metrics [that] our solution provides, giving customers the ability to measure message latency in real time and gain visibility in the underlying transport layer will provide insight into the behaviour and performance of their systems.”

The companies say the integration of their products is a response to market demand. Henry Young, director of product development at TS-Associates, says: “Solace Systems has become a popular technology provider in the financial services sector and we are increasingly seeing its gear in customer data centres.”

Larry Neumann, senior vice president of marketing and alliances at Solace, concurs: “We chose to work with TS-Associates because its solution is in so many accounts we talk to. We both have a large installed base so that is low hanging fruit where we can value add each other’s solutions. I anticipate that we will also joint market into new accounts.”

While Solace will not name beta users, the integrated product is due to be in full production in the next couple of months. Early implementations are expected to be in global investment banks, with Neumann forecasting tens of implementations predominantly in large institutions over the coming year.

“Large firms that have complex environments need help to understand and optimise their performance,” he says. “Small agile firms, perhaps high-frequency traders, may also use our solution as they pathologically shave time off every trade.”

Wading into the debate about the benefits of hardware versus software-based middleware, Neumann adds: “If a business has a high-performance element, hardware outperforms software, deals far better with complexity and reduces costs. It is possible to take out thousands of software middleware servers and replace them with tens to hundreds of hardware middleware servers. The typical replacement ratio is one Solace router doing the work of between 10 and 50 servers running software middleware. This reduces the data centre footprint significantly, as well as the need for power and cooling, people and software licences.

“One of these things – performance, complexity or cost – drives people to hardware and many organisations in the financial services sector have made the leap to hardware. Two years ago, hardware solutions were only in about 30% to 40% of RFPs; today about 90% include hardware.”

While Solace and TS-A are the only hardware couple in the market, Neumann acknowledges competition from hardware messaging specialists Tervela and Tibco Software, which has worked with Solace to create a Tibco Rendezvous product that is, essentially, a Solace hardware platform that integrates and accelerates Tibco’s software. Other players like Activ Financial, Exegy and Celoxica have developed hardware-based market data handling capabilities.

Neumann also notes that TS-Associates supports IBM’s WebSphere MQ and Tibco’s Enterprise Message Service, but concludes: “By sharing our protocols with TS-A and integrating our products we can offer not only the performance of our hardware platform, but also the ability to see and correct any message latency.”