Corvil » News Coverage

Alpha plans to deploy the vendor’s CorvilNet technology over the coming weeks, following a proof-of-concept phase during which it evaluated solutions from competing vendors. Once live, CorvilNet will monitor the latency of various components within Alpha’s internal systems, which are based on the TradExpress system from Swedish vendor Cinnober.

“TradExpress consists of a multitude of processes, such as the trading engine, gateway services, FIX engines and market data feeds. We will use Corvil to monitor all of this different activity, as well as inter-datacenter connectivity,” to ensure low-latency connectivity between its two active datacenters, which are about 45 kilometers apart, says Karl Ottywill, chief information officer at Alpha.

One of Alpha’s primary reasons for deploying a latency management system was to better manage microbursts—spikes in trade and quote message traffic that add latency when systems lack the capacity to process sudden bursts in data volumes. It was therefore critical that Corvil’s technology could identify microbursts and recommend how to optimize network infrastructure to deal with them, says Corvil chief executive Donal Byrne. “They were looking for something that could test microburst behavior and make sure that the infrastructure was protected against that,” Byrne says.

Another contributing factor in Alpha’s selection process was last year’s decision by European multilateral trading facility Turquoise, which also uses Cinnober’s TradExpress platform, to deploy CorvilNet (IMD, Oct. 13, 2008).

“We have written all the message-level decoders [for Turquoise], so it means that the message-layer analytics can be easily built, given that the formats are very similar,” Byrne says.

P2P Predicament

Alpha has not yet decided whether to deploy the vendor’s CorvilClear peer-to-peer technology, which Turquoise rolled out earlier this year (IMD, April 17), to share latency information about its own systems with member trading firms. However, Ottywill says Alpha has discussed using the peer-to-peer technology with Corvil, and may decide to deploy it in the future as part of a broader package of connectivity and data services.

From its offices in New York and Chicago, Corvil already supports Canadian banks who may be interested in using CorvilClear—though the decision to deploy it or not will be for Alpha and its members, Byrne says—and will consider whether to set up a permanent local presence once the vendor reaches a critical mass of customers in Canada, he adds.

Jean-Paul Carbonnier