TS-Associates Turbo-Charges Sixth-Gen TipOff

UK-based latency monitoring technology provider TS-Associates has released the latest version of its TipOff network and latency monitoring appliance, TipOff G6, which includes upgraded CPU and FPGA hardware, and an optional high performance database dubbed TipOff Turbo that -- when used together -- will enable clients such as large brokers and exchanges with high data flows to monitor up to a million transactions per second on one appliance, a 20-fold improvement over the previous version, officials say.

"The main feature we've achieved with the platform is an enormous increase in performance, which means we can monitor more data with less equipment," says Henry Young, chief executive of TS-Associates. "The consequence of that is that when the product is deployed, it takes up much less space physically, which is tremendously useful in co-location sites, where space is at a premium and quite often very expensive."

The revamped appliance will enable TS-Associates to meet the needs of firms with higher than usual data flow rates such as exchanges and large sell-side brokers. Indeed, the first G6 appliance was installed by an unnamed new exchange client last week, Young says.

TipOff G6 also adds higher-bandwidth support for the appliance's Precise Timed Replay capability -- for 40-gigabit Ethernet, whereas previous versions only supported 10-gigabit Ethernet -- which enables clients to precisely replay market data feeds in a way that reproduces the timing characteristics of the original data for performance benchmarking, testing trading algorithms and populating tick databases.

"Typically, people use software techniques to do this, and you don't get anywhere near the accuracy of replay, which is important in the back-testing of trading algorithms because firms need to be sure that any changes in the output of the trading algorithm are due to code changes rather than variability in the input data changing," Young says.