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Vhayu Squeezer Compresses Market Data
June 16, 2008
Vhayu Technologies Corp. says its new Squeezer technology can compress market data by four times with no negative impact on real-time queries and analytics. The solution, announced last week at the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association's Technology Management Conference, is integrated with Vhayu's Velocity tick processing engine.
"Market data rates are growing like crazy," said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Los Gatos, Calif.-based Vhayu. "Most applications have had to store market data in the application, but with volumes growing that gets harder in terms of scalability, fault tolerance and interoperability." Best-execution regulations in the U.S. and Europe and rapidly multiplying trading venues have added to the amount of data firms have to retain.
In development for 18 months, Vhayu is now beta-testing Squeezer, which tightly joins software with a hardware solution that uses a dedicated, specialized processor called a field programmable gate array, or FPGA. The company is seeking to patent the solution, which is expected to be available in the third quarter.
"No one has done this before and the reason is that it is really hard," said Hudson. "We are providing random access to live data that people are using minute by minute with no performance penalty."
Software solutions have reached their limit, he claimed. "The software-only approach is dead," said Hudson. "There are certain things that general-purpose processors are not going to do as well as purpose-built processors--otherwise, why would you have a graphics card in a PC?"
Software-based compression takes up central processing unit cycles, and users have less time as data volumes rise. Firms also have to store the information in a way that allows algorithms and researchers to access it in real time and lets compliance officers retrieve it for regulators. Squeezer works with Velocity, which connects to feeds, normalizes the data, runs analytics and then places the information in a proprietary storage mechanism. Vhayu says the hybrid approach permits firms to keep more data, develop better analytics and strategies and identify long-term market trends.
Hudson noted that just a few years ago he was telling customers that market data rates would reach 1 million messages per second. "The question which arose was, how can we store all that?" he said, recalling that people suggested data storage manufacturer EMC Corp. would "take over the world."
Vhayu is a market data specialist, added Hudson. "We have never been a generalized data storage firm, so we are much more tailored, more efficient and more scalable than a general database company would be," he said. "With Squeezer, we marry our data store with this technology and the hardware and software have to work closely together. The software expects the data to be laid out in a certain way on the disk so it can go retrieve the data fast." Squeezer clients are installing the software on their servers and storing huge amounts of data--80 to 200 terabytes or more--on the systems.
"Everybody has to store this market data, and server space is at an all-time premium," said Hudson. According to Vhayu, the hybrid approach saves space in data centers and reduces electricity and cooling demands.
