Solarflare, Velocimetrics Partner for Deeper Network Data Analysis

The offering combines Solarflare's Ethernet platform, Capture SolarSystem─which is built on top the vendor's low-latency adapter and can capture high volumes of raw packets to disk at hundreds of different points across the enterprise─with Velocimetrics' network analytics and real-time issue alerting.

Currently, clients can deploy Capture SolarSystem in three ways: as a standalone appliance that captures trade and market data packets in real time and writes them to disk for analysis; as a platform that assists in-house applications consuming data in parallel with packet analysis or decoding; or to provide local, real-time capture streams to third-party applications.

After receiving requests from mutual customers, Solarflare wrote an API that enables users to load network data from its storage disks into Velocimetrics' analytics tools. In the past, Solarflare has provided basic network-level analytics such as throughput and packet rates, but Velocimetrics delivers a richer toolset, says Michael Smith, vice president and general manager of host solutions at Solarflare.

"A big part of the reason we are working with Velocimetrics is our customer base, who pointed to them as a partner we should work with. Velocimetrics... can provide a more nuanced approach to performance than we can. They can compare bandwidth, throughput and latency against SLAs, and they can flag when something falls out of band of acceptable performance," Smith says.

The combined tool is intended to meet a growing need for regulatory compliance around record-keeping, safeguarding information and monitoring trades to ensure that orders are executed in the order they are received. "This is the best way to provide a forensic record of everything that occurs on the network, and to ensure trades were made in sequence. Everything is timestamped and all synchronized to one clock, so there is a precise timestamp record of packet flows on the network," he adds.

Velocimetrics and Solarflare will sell the service to their respective customer bases, and will provide joint support services to address any issues. In the near-term, the vendors will target the service at large domestic US and European banks, but over the longer term, will aim the product at the full spectrum of buy-side and sell-side firms.

"Solarflare's turnkey, real-time, distributed capture technology is proving to be attractive for many financial companies looking for a more financially viable and customizable solution for large-scale deployments," says Velocimetrics chief operating officer Paul Spencer in a statement. "Capture SolarSystem is a comprehensive capture solution that can now be fully integrated with Velocimetrics' technology, providing the ideal complement to our advanced network, middleware, market data and business-level analytics."