Best New Data Product: NovaSparks Data Compression

The Best New Data Product award, as voted by WatersTechnology readers, goes to NovaSparks for its optimized output functionality, which allows its NovaTick ticker plant to conflate data for transmission over microwave networks. This means firms can transmit and receive more data while minimizing latency peaks during high bursts of traffic.

NovaSparks developed the conflation feature in response to demand from clients using microwave networks to distribute normalized data from NovaTick to other datacenters. Market data distribution over microwave networks is an expensive yet critical part of any ultra-low latency trading infrastructure, but transmitting data updates is notoriously challenging because of their inherently low-bandwidth capacity.

By using patent-pending bandwidth shaping and market data conflation mechanisms, NovaTick is able to adapt its output data rate to conform to the microwave networks’ strict bandwidth requirements. For banks and trading firms with NovaSparks deployment, this means the most recent market data updates can be transmitted via their existing microwave networks, while large latency peaks that would otherwise occur during market bursts are eliminated. 

The functionality has been welcomed by trading firms, which typically have to be selective about the markets and the instruments from these markets to transmit, says Cliff Maddox, director of business development and marketing at NovaSparks. “The advantage of our conflation functionality is that it offers better utilization of the bandwidth on their network, so firms can effectively transmit more data.”

Available for all 60 feeds of the NovaTick catalogue, including the major equity and futures and options venues across North America, Europe and Asia, the interface is an additional output option for clients, along with the 10 Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express direct memory access and NovaLink options. 

The functionality adds about 50 nanoseconds of processing time compared with the 10 Gigabit Ethernet output option, with no additional decoding required on the customer site, keeping wire-to-wire latency below 600 nanoseconds. Additionally, it is performed in pure hardware in the same processing pipeline as the feed handler and book-building, which eliminates all software/CPU processing.

Over the past year, NovaSparks has made enhancements to the functionality, including a new message format specifically for microwave networks, which is half the size of a standard message, Maddox says.

He adds that an advantage of using NovaSparks is its time-to-market. “A firm can go out there and buy bandwidth and pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for it. By taking our optimized solution, they can get into production very quickly and cost-effectively.” 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners