Announce "TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition" for performance monitoring of InfiniBand fabrics

LONDON, Sept. 22 -- Trading Systems Associates plc, Voltaire, Ltd. and Accolade Technology Inc. today announce TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition, a new variant of TS-Associates' middleware monitoring product, incorporating software developed by Voltaire and hardware developed by Accolade. TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition has been designed to deliver ultra-low latency and performance monitoring for Wombat Data Fabric systems deployed on InfiniBand, the NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions flagship middleware offering. The solution uses the Voltaire Messaging System (VMS), Voltaire's RDMA based software solution that dramatically improves performance of publisher-subscriber applications running on InfiniBand fabrics.

The Wombat Data Fabric is being adopted by top tier investment banks and automated trading funds that have a requirement for industry leading performance, low latency delivery and highly deterministic operational characteristics. These requirements imply the need for an integrated performance and latency monitoring solution. TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition is the first such solution, born of a partnership between TS-Associates, Voltaire, Accolade and their charter customer -- a major US investment institution.

TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition delivers unique performance and latency monitoring capabilities. On the performance side, it analyzes all messaging traffic in real time, with drill down of overall system aggregate performance by either publisher or subscriber and with traffic rate visibility right down to the individual data flow in terms of messages/second and bytes/second. On the latency side, the product tracks the latency of every unique data flow through the system, aggregating up by publisher and subscriber, thus enabling user drill down from top level system aggregate latency. All latency stats are recorded to TipOff's internal time series database for charting/reporting and for correlation with other metrics required for latency root cause analysis. Latency is measured at the messaging layer to nano second resolution. There is little point in measuring fabric transit latency, because InfiniBand is a deterministic communications medium.

Developed in partnership with Voltaire and Accolade, TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition leverages the latest in InfiniBand RDMA messaging techniques, married with a novel hardware acceleration capability developed for TS-Associates by Accolade. Monitoring of application level messaging performance and latency is delivered through a minimally invasive VMS driver instrumentation technique. Instrumentation meta-data is delivered directly to hardware within TipOff via InfiniBand RDMA operations, where it is immediately time stamped and pre-processed in FPGA firmware, prior to software based analysis by TipOff.

Henry Young, TS-Associates' director of product development, says, "With our existing 1GE and 10GE solutions, our typical approach to middleware analysis and latency monitoring is to capture passively all network traffic, then decode and analyse in real time. However we quickly realised that to apply the same technique to WDF would result in a monitoring solution of similar cost to the system it would be monitoring. Therefore we approached Voltaire with the idea of device driver instrumentation in the VMS layer, combined with a new enabling technology we designed called the 'application tap,' which has been built for us by our hardware partner Accolade. The result is an astonishingly elegant, simple and low cost solution."

Conor Allen, VP Technology at NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions, says, "Wombat Data Fabric, our ultra low latency middleware, presents a challenge to traditional monitoring techniques when running on InfiniBand. TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition provides our customers with key insights into the operation and performance of Wombat Data Fabric in a cost effective manner."

"Comprehensive system monitoring is vital to accelerating the adoption of InfiniBand fabrics in the financial services industry and is a key differentiator for the Wombat Data Fabric in particular," said Amir Prescher, executive vice president of business development, Voltaire. "By working with TS-Associates, who are already firmly established with some of our key customers, we now offer a best of breed solution that combines the performance, efficiency and monitoring capabilities these customers require."

Jon Sreekanth, Accolade's CTO, says, "We have been working closely with TS-Associates to bring to market a new range of FPGA accelerated data processing cards. We quickly identified that Henry's concept of an 'application tap' would have wide ranging uses in software instrumentation. Hardware based time stamping of software metrics, with the only added overhead being a single memory write operation, is as close to non-invasive as it is possible to get. Apart from cost savings, this changes the monitoring metaphor completely. Now users can monitor software events that are important to them, rather than just whatever activity is visible on the wire."

About TS-Associates

Trading Systems Associates plc partners with leading financial markets participants to overcome the complex technology integration issues that relate to the deployment and management of middleware based financial markets applications. As a result of its focused technology consulting and through its close partnership with customers, TS-Associates is rapidly establishing itself as the leading developer of appliance based, hardware accelerated, real time middleware analysis and passive latency monitoring products. Founded in 1999, TS-Associates is based in London. More information about TS-Associates is available at www.ts-a.com.

About TipOff

Developed through close partnerships with its customers, TipOff provides unique capabilities in areas such as middleware operational analysis, passive latency monitoring, application behaviour validation, infrastructure utilisation chargeback and capacity planning. Delivered as an appliance solution, TipOff incorporates specialist hardware for packet capture and FPGA accelerated processing, guaranteeing zero packet loss on 1GE, 10GE and Infiniband networks, and enabling the analysis in real time of over one million messages per second. TipOff is in production at leading US and European financial institutions.

About Voltaire

Voltaire Ltd. (NASDAQ: VOLT) designs and develops server and storage switching and software solutions that enable high-performance grid computing within the datacenter. Voltaire refers to its server and storage switching and software solutions as the Voltaire Grid Backbone. Voltaire's products leverage InfiniBand technology and include director-class switches, multi-service switches, fixed-port configuration switches, Ethernet and Fibre Channel routers and standards-based driver and management software. Voltaire's solutions have been sold to a wide range of end customers including governmental, research and educational organizations, as well as enterprises in the manufacturing, oil and gas, entertainment, life sciences and financial services industries. Founded in 1997, Voltaire Ltd. is headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, and has its U.S. headquarters in Billerica, Mass. More information about Voltaire is available at www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.

About Accolade

Accolade Technology Inc. is an FPGA specialist company that works closely with partners to deliver solutions in industry verticals, such as financial, enterprise and rich media applications. As latency requirements become tighter and packet rates keep increasing, these demanding environments are a perfect fit for our packet offload and monitoring technologies. Accolade is located in Acton, Mass., and can be contacted at www.accoladetechnology.com.

About NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions

A unit of NYSE Euronext (NYX), NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions is a leader in providing complete connectivity, data management and transaction solutions for trading firms, vendors and financial markets throughout the world. Offering a suite of comprehensive, best-of-breed commercial technology solutions that include advanced end-to-end market data management, global exchange connectivity and matching technologies, co-location systems, and super low-latency order routing capabilities, NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions' products attract and enable the free flow of liquidity for high-volume markets around the world. This unit operates SFTI, one of the world's largest, most reliable financial transaction networks; NYSE TransactTools, the high-performance, end-to-end connectivity software; and Wombat, offering the industry's most advanced platform for real-time market data distribution and integration. With offices across the U.S., Europe, Singapore and Japan, NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions' commitment to superior development, engineering and customer service has earned the trust to power the trading operations of hundreds of global financial institutions, including core technology for 17 of the world's 20 largest securities firms. For additional information, visit www.nyse.com/tradingsolutions.

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Source: Voltaire Ltd.