SCIENCE

Kove has announced the highest performance ever recorded for 14 of 17 STAC-M3 Benchmarks for time-series management (tick database) solutions. The benchmark suite contains a series of complex queries designed by leading trading firms on the STAC Benchmark Council to reflect real-world business needs, and was performed at R Systems.

Trading in today's financial markets increasingly relies on the "Race to 0", where improving performance means money, and improving collection and analysis of trade and quote time-series data gives a competitive edge. Surging data volumes increase the market challenges in which prices can change millions of times per second. Low latency trading requires firms rapidly to retrieve, store, and analyze massive quantities of data in order to back-test new trading algorithms, monitor risk, and satisfy regulatory demands.

Kove, Dell, Mellanox, and Kx bring years of industry experience together to provide one of the leading performing market data capture and analysis capabilities in the world. Holding world records for latency, IOPS, and bandwidth, Kove's XPD2 is the lynchpin to achieving the 14 fastest STAC-M3 Benchmarks ever. In the benchmarks XPD2 storage was mesh-connected via Mellanox ConnectX-2 InfiniBand adapters through a Mellanox MTS3600 Switch to a Kove Appliance based on purpose-built Dell PowerEdgeR910 servers.

The STAC-M3 Benchmarks were run using a year of simulated trade and quote data. Kove's benchmarks showed improvements across the board, including:

-- over 12x the speed of the previously best Market Snapshot benchmark*

-- over 5x the speed of the previously best Theoretical P&L benchmark*

-- over 2x the speed of the previously best Volume Curves benchmark*

Kove Direct Storage Access KDSA(TM) technology outperforms all other storage media, including Flash memory and spinning disks, maintains consistent speed at any capacity level, up to 100%, and does not degrade over time. This record-setting performance allows organizations to improve I/O processing and remove storage bottlenecks, while reducing the cost of data center space and power consumption.

"This collaboration in deploying the Kove Xpress Memory Disk is a continuation of our leadership in high performance storage, providing real world solutions for those who need the absolute fastest storage available," states Kove CEO, John Overton. "The XPD2 connects directly to storage fabrics via standard Fibre Channel and InfiniBand interconnects, while reducing end-to-end application latency beyond any other available storage."

Industry partners also see the value of Kove's performance. Simon Garland, Chief Strategist at Kx Systems, says: "These are excellent results and demonstrate that with the right configuration of hardware, software, and specialized storage appliances, remarkable performance improvements can be easily achieved. I am delighted that we saw major improvements in disk access: all the cores were able to work at maximum speed, rather than having to wait for the drives, as one would in a standard set-up."

"We are pleased to collaborate with Kove and provide the fastest interconnect solution to Kove's XPD2 storage appliance", said David Barzilai, Vice President of Marketing at Mellanox. "Utilizing the advantages of Mellanox InfiniBand, Kove has achieved remarkable performance, helping eliminate storage bottlenecks across a wide variety of applications in both the Financial and High Performance Computing markets."

"Faster access to information means faster time to analysis and faster time to profitability for our financial services customers," said Bob Barris, vice president of Global Sales, Banking and Securities at Dell. "Dell continues to look for new ways to help financial services customers to focus on improving enterprise efficiency and today's benchmark proves that there are affordable solutions for analyzing market data, despite unprecedented volumes."