NovaSparks Bows Data Compressor to Boost Microwave Throughput Rates

NovaSparks COO Olivier Baetz says the vendor developed the conflation feature in response to demand from clients using microwave networks to distribute normalized data from NovaTick to other datacenters. Because microwave bandwidth is much more expensive than fiber networks, microwave connectivity between datacenters can be only 1 percent the size of typical fiber networks.

“This is why trading firms have to be very careful in choosing what markets and what instruments from these markets they choose to transmit. But they always want to transmit more, whether it is more markets, more instruments, or additional depth of book for some instruments. The new output market interface offers better utilization of the bandwidth on their network, while remaining in pure hardware for the lowest latency,” Baetz says.

Officials say the new feature covers all 60 market feeds already supported by NovaTick, and adds about 50 nanoseconds (ns) of processing time compared to NovaSparks’ existing 10 Gigabit Ethernet output option, with no additional decoding required on the customer site, keeping wire-to-wire latency at less than 800ns. However, Baetz says this can save hundreds of microseconds in queuing latency during market bursts.

“The optimized output functionality provides them with the built-in capability to adapt the output rate to the available bandwidth of their wireless networks. They don’t need to do it themselves. More importantly, the functionality is performed in pure hardware in the same processing pipeline as the feed handler and book-building, which eliminates all software/CPU processing,” he adds.