Tim Bass
Thu, 25 Oct 2007 06:57:50 +0000
XASAX has put together a virtual machine CEP hosting solution, at the source of the majority of stock exchanges in the US, using VMWare and clustered hardware. They have implemented a 5 POP financial backbone of market data with proximity hosting / co-location at each exchange throughout the country, which they claim, encompasses 95% of all publicly available market liquidity.
XASAX is currently using a StreamBase CEP engine with Studio seats. However, the XASAX network is touted as agnostic, so users can use any CEP or cyber trading software platform.
Each ticker plant on the XASAX network uses a proprietary message bus for machine to machine connectivity. The CEP engines are connected via Infiniband to a ticker plant. The ticker plants receive raw multicast market data direct from the exchanges.
There are 3 hosted ticker plants on the XASAX network.
1. Exegy (http://www.exegy.com). Hardware accelerated feed handlers providing consolidated market data feeds. They are parsing OPRA (~200 mbps of streaming market data) in ~80 microseconds in one machine using a combination of FPGAs and CPU.
2. InfoDyne (http://www.infodyne.com). Software based parsing. This solution parses OPRA in ~500 microseconds in 4 machines. It is very similar to Wombat.
3. XASAX custom parsers - http://www.opentick.com. XAXAS told us that they have spent the past 4 years developing ticker plant technology, entitlement systems, distribution methods, and feed handlers for exchanges. They are using lightweight versions of this software to drive CEP engines.
StreamBase, at the same time, incorporated opentick APIs this month independent of XASAX. Therefore, StreamBase works with the XASAX software in the initial launch period.
Under the XASAX teaming strategy with CEP vendors, XASAX hopes to bring down the overall cost of deploying a CEP algo trading engine dramatically.
XASAX plans to have ongoing beta tests for new feeds, engines & products. In addition, they plan to maintain beta test trial periods for all hosted applications and virtual servers. In the latter part of November, XASAX plans to go live with Nasdaq feeds & StreamBase in a production cyber trading environment.



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