Flash plays all the right notes for trading platform

Volbroker is the market leader for electronic FX option price transparency and efficiency, and was designed for and by professional FX option traders to give real-time access to price information, execution reports and a host of other information. Volbroker serves over 150 large investment bank clients globally, and operates out of London, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, New York, Singapore, and Tel Aviv.

The FX ecosystem and supporting technology has changed dramatically over the last two decades. Requirements have changed and trading volumes have increased drastically. The data that is processed for option trading is significantly high on volume and detail and requires a very reliable, highly available, and high-performance storage solution in order to meet service levels and stay ahead of the competition. Tradition-ICAP’s Volbroker platform has always had a heavy dependence on storage performance and while they were running the entire system cached in memory, the performance of their traditional storage was becoming a critical problem that they could no longer afford.

“Even when loading everything into memory there were times that data would leave the cache and the Oracle database had to directly access the storage subsystem, and at peak times, the entire system would spend excessive amounts of time waiting for our traditional storage subsystem,” said Terry Benson, COO at Tradition-ICAP. “We needed a solution that eliminated the storage bottleneck and delivered consistent low latency and high IOPS at all times. Violin all-flash arrays exceeded our expectations and are clearly the best choice for our business. Using Violin arrays we have eliminated any worries about supporting our growing business, and we can concentrate on developing the new technologies that will help our customers to be even more successful in their trading.”

Beyond providing the requisite storage performance for their application needs, the Violin flash storage solutions revealed problems in their database architecture that were previously imperceptible to the IT team. Specifically, the team found that a number of database queries were less than efficiently written and could be fine-tuned for more efficient processing of the data.

With Violin, Tradition-ICAP’s customers will be able to rely on the performance of Volbroker at even the busiest of times. This reliable access is critical and provides them with a competitive advantage; without it, traders must resort to less efficient and more time-consuming methods of execution. The second, yet equally important outcome is that Tradition-ICAP developers are now free to develop new and innovative products, rather than constantly battling with unsuitable disk-based storage systems.

“Violin all-flash arrays are perfect for time-sensitive applications, such as foreign exchange trading, where a millisecond is worth hundreds of millions of pounds,” added Mick Bradley, Managing Director, Violin Memory EMEA. “The solution’s reliability, high-performance and data availability characteristics are critical to this market, where even a few seconds delay can have major financial consequences.”