| TipOff® Deployment Tally Reaches 25 |
 |
| Tuesday, 08 May 2007 17:35 |
|
Trading Systems Associates plc, specialists in providing solutions to complex financial markets technology problems, is pleased to announce that the tally of deployed TipOff® instances has now reached 25.
TipOff is TS-Associates’ middleware analysis appliance product which is starting to gain traction with financial institutions that are pushing the performance envelope of real-time financial middleware products such as TIBCO Rendezvous, Reuters RMDS and 29West LBM.
TipOff appliances currently in production include a global deployment of 21 with a major US investment bank, a London based deployment of 3 with a major European investment/retail bank, and one currently in use at the Securities Technology Analysis Centre based in Chicago. TipOff is delivered as a purpose built rack mount appliance containing a high performance multi-processor motherboard, RAID disk storage, multiple gigabit network adapters, specialist gigabit capable packet capture hardware and FPGA based hardware acceleration with optimised firmware. TipOff capabilities include middleware operational statistics analysis, passive latency monitoring, capacity planning, application behaviour validation and infrastructure utilisation drill-down. TipOff is able to carry out guaranteed gigabit wire speed packet capture, protocol decode and middleware analysis, all in real time. Henry Young, TS-Associates’ Director of Product Development, says, "TipOff is a unique product that brings together all the experience we have accumulated over the last eight years in building data capture and analysis solutions for real time middleware stacks. The advent of FPGA accelerated capture cards and high performance 64-bit multi-core processors, has enabled us, for the first time in any product, to capture, decode and analyse over one million messages per second". TipOff decodes middleware protocols from the wire, with no reliance on middleware vendor APIs or daemon processes. A vitally important design aim in TipOff is that in order to monitor and analyse the operation of a middleware environment, there should be no dependency on any component of that middleware product. Furthermore, as an appliance product using hardware accelerated capture technology that absolutely guarantees zero packet loss, TipOff is not exposed to the kind of data loss experienced by regular server grade network interfaces, and is thus able to yield a complete forensic analysis of network events such as multicast storms or microbursts. Henry Young says, “We know of no other product that shares our key enabling capabilities of guaranteed capture coupled with vendor dissociated decode. Add to that our multi-dimensional messaging analysis functionality and we believe that we have a uniquely powerful product on our hands.” Whilst principally used for multi-dimensional middleware messaging analysis, TipOff will shortly be entering evaluation with a global institution, applied to high resolution passive latency monitoring of direct exchange feed infrastructures. 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 monitoring, trouble shooting and analysis products. TipOff, TS-Associates’ first product using proprietary hardware acceleration technology, has been purchased by leading US and European investment banks. |
