Corvil » News Coverage

Fixnetix originally deployed the vendor’s CorvilNet latency monitoring solution to monitor and manage latency of internal systems and network at the end of 2008 (IMD, Nov. 3, 2008), but has now extended the technology’s scope to include CorvilClear, which allows trading participants and service providers to share latency information across their respective infrastructures.

“We have CorvilNet appliances in nearly every European co-location facility where major exchanges and MTFs host their matching engines,” says Alasdair Moore, Fixnetix director of business development. “Because we are tapping the circuits at the closest possible point to each exchange and MTF matching engine, we can offer a pure end-to-end insight into latency.”

Using the CorvilClear peer-to-peer latency monitoring technology, Fixnetix can therefore share latency data for individual message packets as they travel from an exchange or MTF, across the vendor’s network infrastructure and into its clients’ datacenters.

“[Fixnetix] can offer a service that allows their clients to peer with their monitoring appliances, which are hosted at exchange and MTF co-location datacenters, to get full latency measurements from the front door of the exchange all the way to the client premises,” says Corvil chief executive Donal Byrne. In addition, Fixnetix can also use CorvilClear to co-operate with trading venues that also use the technology. “The idea is not to have Corvil in the middle, but to allow our clients to form a community by sharing latency data across their infrastructures,” Byrne says, adding that each Corvil user can define exactly how much latency information they choose to share.

Fixnetix is already live using CorvilClear together with one of its clients, which is using the peer-to-peer software to source a wide range of latency data, and is in discussions about using the peer-to-peer software together with European multilateral trading facility Turquoise, which deployed CorvilClear earlier this year to give its member firms an insight into the latency of its internal systems (IMD, April 20).

“We can monitor the latency from any point to any other point across our infrastructure. If a client wants to understand latency within a co-location facility, between one exchange co-lo and another, or from an exchange co-lo to their own datacenter, we can monitor all that information and share it with them in real-time,” Moore says.

Jean-Paul Carbonnier