Corvil » London Stock Exchange

The London Stock Exchange uses Corvil technology to improve on latency and time to market.

The London Stock Exchange is one of the world’s premier financial institutions. With more than 350 members, the LSE is a premier source of equity liquidity, benchmark prices and market data for UK equities in Europe. Founded in the coffee houses of 17th century London, LSE has a distinguished history of innovation, including the launching of the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in 1995. This reputation for innovation continues today with the recent completion of the 4 year Technology Road Map (TRM), which includes state of the art price delivery (Infolect) and faster trade execution (TradElect) systems.

Picture: The London Stock Exchange

The Project

In the ongoing evolution of the global financial trading business, the importance of high speed price dissemination and deal execution has never been greater. In order to meet these challenges, the London Stock Exchange has completed a four year trading system development project known as Technology Roadmap (TRM). Begun in 2003, TRM’s main objective was to introduce a next generation trading system for their Member Firms that would provide:

• Increased capacity
• Lower latency
• A reduction in the time and cost needed to roll out new services

The culmination of the TRM was TradeElect, a brand new trading system which brings unprecedented levels of performance, enhanced functionality and new services to LSE’s markets. A key part of TradeElect was Performance Channels, a high speed delivery mechanism that increases the rate at which data can be sent out to the market. Performance Channels is of particular benefit to those customers who need to have the lowest latency connectivity to the Exchange during peak trading periods. The service offers a reduced latency, high speed delivery mechanism, which removes the throttles that are present on existing service channels.

In order to guarantee the latency thresholds for Performance Channels, LSE needed a platform which could identify microbursts during periods of high trading activity, and monitor their latency impact on the network.  CorvilNet technology was identified as the only available technology to meet all these requirements.

The Solution

LSE deployed CorvilNet appliances to monitor their entire network. The solution was deployed with appliances at each of the data centres to monitor the WAN links to the customers, and was integrated with LSE’s existing configuration and monitoring Operations Support Systems. The solution monitors traffic microbursts and latency for all client connections giving visibility into performance for both the Service and Performance Channels. As a result of the new solution LSE can:

• Baseline the current latency for each customer
• Report on exception conditions in network latency
• Ensure there is no packet loss
• Monitor change in latency and maintain a high performance baseline as new services are introduced.

Robin Paine CTO, London Stock Exchange

“To achieve our latency and performance targets for TradeElect™ we needed network visibility at sub–millisecond granularity. Corvil’s solution gives us this visibility and the capability to provision and monitor our performance channels for low latency” Robin Paine CTO, London Stock Exchange.

Benefits

With over £20 billion worth of trades taking place daily, the importance of a stable, secure and reliable network is self-evident. The CorvilNet solution is now a key part of LSE’s future network performance management strategy because it delivers:

• Visibility into latency and loss for customer connections
• Protection of investment in Infolect and TradElect systems by ensuring the network is equipped for high performance
• TradeElect allows LSE’s trades to be executed in milliseconds. CorvilNet ensures that the network is provisioned to meet this commitment
• Immediate visibility of all application flows over the network – market data feeds, trades and re–requests
• Optimisation of resources on the network – as new services are tested, CorvilNet is used to assess their impact on existing network traffic and infrastructure prior to general deployment. CorvilNet can also explore the possible impact of alternative configurations without actually implementing them in the network.
• Reduced amount of time spent troubleshooting for problems on the network – any performance deviations can be quickly analysed and correctly attributed to, for example, specific user behaviour, trading surges, or network conditions, saving time and removing uncertainty.
• A lower risk and a faster trading environment – organic growth in market and trading data can cause gradual erosion of performance — CorvilNet is used to periodically review network performance.