Corvil » White Papers
White Papers
Managing Performance in Financial Trading Networks
Performance targets in financial trading networks are more stringent than in any other type of network deployed today. Message latency and data loss result in missed trading opportunities and have a direct impact on revenue. The standard of performance needed for success is determined by competition from other trading organizations, and this has led to an ‘arms race’ in which latency targets have steadily shrunk from tens of milliseconds to milliseconds, and even to microseconds.
CorvilNet is a network monitoring and analysis system, designed to provide visibility into network performance at the timescales which matter for financial trading. Traditional network monitoring tools which make measurements over periods of seconds and longer, fail to identify conditions which can add hundreds of milliseconds of latency. CorvilNet addresses this deficiency with a set of new techniques enabling microsecond-level insight into latency and the conditions that cause it. This document describes the benefits that CorvilNet provides with reference to a market-data dissemination environment, depicted schematically in Figure 1. CorvilNet is implemented by deploying measurement appliances at key points within the network that monitor network traffic using either passive taps or Cisco SPAN (Switched Port Analyzer) connections. In the following sections we describe how to use CorvilNet to manage performance in each part of the network where added latency can occur.
