HP Drives Down Latency for Canadian Trading Platforms

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In financial markets, every ounce of latency matters. Using HP’s Converged Infrastructure, Canada’s Alpha Trading Systems has been able to inject greater performance into what they call the leading alternative trading system for Canadian equity securities. To increase trading efficiency, the HP solution has enabled Alpha to cut order-entry latency to sub-millisecond levels and execute trading orders within an average of 750 microseconds.

With our HP Converged Infrastructure, we’ve achieved the fastest native execution speeds in Canada for our trading platform and are closing the gap on execution speeds in markets around the world,” said Karl Ottywill, chief information officer, Alpha. “This not only puts our trading capabilities at the forefront of the Canadian marketplace, but enables us to aggressively compete at a global level.”

If you are like me, you are probably scratching your head as to what “converged infrastructure” really means. An IDC Whitepaper described it this way:

The term converged system refers to a new set of enterprise products that package server, storage, and networking architectures together as a single unit and utilize built-in service-oriented management tools for the purpose of driving efficiencies in time to deployment and simplifying ongoing operations. Within a converged system, each of the compute, storage, and network devices are aware of each other and are tuned for higher performance than if constructed in a purely modular architecture. While a converged system may be constructed of modular components that can be swapped in and out as scaling requires, ultimately the entire system is integrated at either the hardware layer or the software layer.