Velocimetrics Ramps Up TipOff Storage Capacity Six-Fold

The new TipOff appliances offer between two and six times more storage capacity compared to their predecessors, an improvement that has been achieved by introducing high capacity disks, double the RAM and faster CPU speeds.

"This range of appliances is built on next generation technology. It's the densest storage that we can fit into each appliance. We've added storage disks that are five or six times the capacity of previous disks," says Steve Rodgers, head of engineering at Velocimetrics.

The highest performance new appliance, dubbed V205, will enable TipOff to retain up to 24 terabytes of raw captured trading data or 160TB of compressed captured trading data on a single 2U appliance. The appliance will also enable TipOff clients to decode 48 million market data ticks per second and store the data for an extended period of time. For example, a steady 1Gbit/s (gigabit per second) stream of market data ticks can now be retained for more than 9 weeks.

V205 was built at the request of an unnamed investment bank customer who was looking to store data for longer periods of time in order to test how their algorithms perform under different trading conditions

"Every year volumes are increasing but for compliance purposes or for back-testing, it's also useful to build a repository of data that can be retained for longer," Rodgers says. "In this particular case, it was based around being able to perform testing on algo engines. The bank uses the appliance to capture market events, and where they might be experiencing problems in relation to a particular event, they can look at what happened and why, then they can get their algo to react a certain way next time, to improve their performance," he adds.

In addition to providing more storage, the new appliances are likely to lower the cost of storing large volumes of captured trading data, as in the past customers would require multiple appliances or external data retention solutions such as NAS and SAN drives to achieve the same performance.

"Previously the footprint in a datacenter to store this amount of data was much larger as it required multiple racks, more cooling, power etc. Having this dense storage packaged into a 2U appliance means you can have greater capacity with much lower datacenter costs," Rodgers says.

Currently the increased capacity is available on the Tip-Off latency monitoring appliances but going forward, the vendor will also launch support for upcoming releases of the Velocimetrics product as well. 

Since acquiring an exclusive worldwide license to sell TipOff in the financial sector in 2014, after the platform's original developer, UK-based latency monitoring technology provider TS-Associates, was placed in administration, Velocimetrics has made a number of enhancements to the product. For example, in March the vendor added a new compression card from AHA Products Group (AHA) to enable TipOff to capture 40 million market data updates per second.