Tervela Rolls TMX-500 - Smaller, Cheaper, Faster …

Messaging systems specialist Tervela has introduced the TMX-500 Message Switch, providing superior performance over its existing product, in a smaller package. The company says it already has some 20 orders for the new switch from existing and new customers - including hedge funds and investment banks - and expects to deliver them in the third quarter.

Packaged in a 2U rack space unit - half the size of the current TMX-1000 - the new switch makes use of faster Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to, among other things, speed up table look-ups, and also increased use of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to perform processing, for instance for protocol manipulation.

Moreover, the TMX-500 uses solid state disks instead of electro-mechanical units for data logging and features variable speed cooling fans, driven by more thermal sensors embedded within the switch. The above combination of features results in higher performance, with less power consumption.

In addition to leveraging FPGA and ASIC technology, each switch also incorporates an x86 processor for overall management, though Tervela has switched to using Intel chips in the TMX-500, compared to the AMD product used in the existing switch.

Switches can be configured with modular connectivity up to 16 ports of one Gigabit Ethernet or four ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet - the TMX-1000 does not support 10Gig Ethernet, though it does support InfiniBand. Performance from four million to 64 million messages per second, coupled with a consistent sub 10 microsecond platform latency is achievable, the company says.

Like the TMX-1000, the new switch supports Tervela’s Open Data Framework, which includes de facto standards like the Java Message Service (JMS) and the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP).

Company officials stress the attractive pricing of the TMX-500, which they say is less than half the price of the existing switch. In particular, they distance themselves from a ‘notorious’ one-time list price of $525,000 for the TMX-1000, which they say was never a representative price presented to customers. And while they decline to discuss pricing specifics since it is based on specific customer configurations, they claim to cost “a fraction” compared to their competitors.

Tervela will be showcasing the TMX-500 at the Sifma Technology Management Conference in New York City this week. With new products from the likes of Activ Financial, Celoxica, Exegy and Solace Systems also slated to be displayed, this year’s event is likely to advance the case for the adoption of hardware acceleration technologies in the financial markets, especially for high performance and low-latency market data handling.