Fixnetix, NovaSparks Ally For Delivery of Managed Hardware Feed Handlers

Low-latency data infrastructure, trading and risk technology provider Fixnetix is partnering with NovaSparks, a provider of hardware-accelerated data capture, processing and distribution technologies, to make NovaSparks' FPGA (field programmable gate array) feed handlers available to clients as a managed service from Fixnetix's co-location venues in the US and Europe.

Fixnetix is now rolling out NovaSparks' FPGA Market Data Matrix feed handlers-which currently support feeds from Nasdaq, CME Group, Eurex, Bats Global Markets, Direct Edge, NYSE Arca, the London Stock Exchange and its Turquoise multilateral trading facility-in its facilities, starting with Frankfurt and Basildon, where Deutsche Börse's Eurex and NYSE Euronext's Liffe derivatives markets are hosted, respectively, as well as 350 East Cermak in Chicago, which hosts the Intercontinental Exchange, and CME Group's new co-location datacenter in Aurora, Ill. This will then be followed by installations in Carteret, Weehawken and Secaucus in New Jersey and 111 8th Avenue in New York.

The two vendors will ultimately make NovaSparks' feed handlers available in every Fixnetix facility, according to client demand, says Alasdair Moore, business development director at Fixnetix. He adds that Fixnetix is also planning to establish presences in NYSE's Mahwah facility-as a result of the deal with NYSE Technologies that saw it take a 25 percent stake in Fixnetix (IMD, Feb. 20)-as well as Moscow, Japan, Australia, and Singapore, and the vendor also announced last week that it will set up a presence in the new co-location facility that the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing is now building.

By leveraging a managed service solution and potentially using NovaSparks' FPGA feed handlers in combination with Fixnetix's iX-ecute FPGA Market Gateways for trade execution, "somebody can have a very fast solution for getting data into their environment, which could also be FPGA, and then be able to put an order back on the wire again with all the pre-trade checks and have all the normalization across multiple asset classes for both data and trading be taken care of by a single organization," says Moore.

In addition, NovaSparks' FPGA feed handlers provide deterministic sub-microsecond levels of latency to firms who require the lowest latency trading solutions possible, and making it available as a managed service opens up access to firms who may not have the resources to deploy and maintain such an infrastructure themselves, says NovaSparks chief executive Yves Charles.

Fixnetix is providing NovaSparks' feed handlers as either a dedicated or shared solution to customers, depending on a client's requirements, and customers can connect to NovaSparks via direct Ethernet or PCIe connections within Fixnetix's infrastructure as well as via cross-connects between Fixnetix's and the client's servers within a datacenter.