When failure is not an option
First Published in Automated Trader Magazine Issue 13 Q2 2009
How do you prevent systemic failures in high-performance trading infrastructures? We called in Rob Ciampa, Vice President, Product Management at Tervela.
Today’s competitive environment leaves little room for operational mishaps, yet the foundation of the trading business – technology – is more susceptible than ever to failure. Mission-critical, high-performance trading infrastructures remain extremely vulnerable to constituent failures, while burgeoning complexity and increasing system co-dependencies exacerbate risk and time-to-resolution.
My objective with this article is to examine key technology hazards and then to explain how to mitigate danger proactively without negatively impacting the performance equation.
The Sky is Falling
Recently, a major financial services institution specializing in mutual funds suffered a 48-hour outage in a critical business unit resulting in over $20 million in losses and numerous litigation issues. The cause was the inability of algorithmic trading servers to process market data effectively, forcing the data producers to rebroadcast information continually and thus to bring the underlying network down.
Another leading international financial firm recently saw its large New York City trading floor experience numerous outages that resulted in a suspended order flow of $90 billion and losses of $3 million per hour. Data volumes wreaking havoc in the middle office and back office triggered network and system outages that brought down the front office.
The trading world continues to evolve as firms adjust their trading strategies to exploit m...
The rest of this Article is only available to Paid Subscribers
You can get news like this delivered directly to your email inbox as a real-time alert or as part of a daily/weekly summary.
Click here to set your preferences now!
