Vela, the independent provider of trading and market access technology for global multi-asset electronic trading, has announced the successful rollout of the latest version of SMDS, its flagship ticker plant software, to all clients globally. This marks a significant milestone in Vela’s 2018 roadmap, delivering a number of key client-driven enhancements across the full Vela Stack.
Vela’s Ticker Plant is a software-based feed handling solution providing ultra-low latency, normalized access to over 250 venues, with global coverage and support for all major asset classes. This also includes Vela’s fully-managed European Best Bid Offer (EBBO) solution, US Options Consolidated Book (US OCB) and National Best Bid Offer (NBBO) solution. Version 4.3 of SMDS includes a set of client, market, and technology driven changes to help clients cost effectively manage continually growing market data rates and navigate an increasingly global trading landscape to enable cohesive and profitable trading strategies.
The enhancements include a range of Kernel Bypass technology improvements which encompass support for SolarFlare SFN8542+, OpenOnload-201710 and Mellanox Connect x-4 and a threading re-architecture to offer flexible thread configuration, DMA buffers and small buffer pools optimizing the deployment to the shape of the inbound data with EV_FI SocketFactory. Combined, these improvements deliver latency and capacity improvements, which when testing against an OPRA capacity weekend, successfully processed a peak sustained traffic of 15.6 million packets a second across 48 lines on a single server without a gap – a two-fold increase on today’s peak production traffic and considerable capacity headroom to support the recently announced increases in OPRA bandwidth.
SMDS 4.3 also delivers a 50% improvement in latency for JAVA API users due to improvements in performance and reduced garbage collection. All users also benefit from new configurable queue types and threading options for distribution to downstream systems.
In addition to performance improvements, this latest version also includes new business functionality to further enhance Vela’s book building capabilities. This includes support for alternative symbologies when building books, the ability to filter secondary instruments based on the status of the primary listing, and enhanced consolidated market statistics.
Ollie Cadman, Head of Business Operations at Vela commented:
In line with our ongoing commitment to provide clients with regular software updates, this latest version of our Ticker Plant software ensures clients can continue to handle ever-increasing volume rates without the need for additional or specialist hardware, with a low, deterministic latency profile. As always our software can be deployed directly to clients or via our award-winning managed services.” He added, “Our book building functionality continues to lead the market in providing a single, consolidated view of liquidity across fragmented markets with the flexibility and operational control to dynamically add and remove specific venues or build custom composite books.
Patrick Larkin, Global Head of Client Services at Vela said:
The ability to introduce technology changes, functionality features, and performance re-architecting in this controlled way has allowed our clients to more easily manage their implementation projects and resources.