FOREX TECHNOLOGY
in a third party context?” asks Spencer Greene, senior VP product management and marketing, at network visibility firm Endace. “You should demand that they provide some measurements; not everyone in that space is doing measurement today but I think that it’s best practice that the firms providing the network services serving the FX low latency market are moving toward having measurement as part of their service offering.”
He observes that traditionally within the network services environment, a firm buys a link from one place to another supported by a service level agreement that confirms the supplier intends to meet a certain latency and connectivity level, and in the case of a problem they are to be contacted. Providers should have very fine granularity measurements of how they are performing.
“Tere is a tradition in the network space of trust but also verify,” he says. “If you have enough at stake then you can deploy your own equipment either at one end of the spectrum or two ends of the spectrum, that will capture the network traffic, timestamp it which is key to allowing latency measurement to happen, then use
those timestamps to do your own measurements and keep your vendor honest.” Te trick is not that firms are not measuring latency, but that they are not measuring at the right level of detail to be useful.
“First providers are often not measuring at a level of sufficient precision or frequency to get a detailed picture across the whole day. Tey would know when it’s not busy, if they have a certain piece of fibre what is the latency of that fibre; everyone knows that. But if you ask them, was there any period that latency increased by more than 50%, even for a second, folks generally will not know that,” Greene advises.
It is not always the case that when a network service firm knows that information, they will share it; network operators in all sectors, will often provide as little information as they are obligated to provide because if it turns out that have a deficiency in the network they have no interest in exposing that. It is not technology restrictions that are limiting successful measurement, he adds, but a lack of understanding in how to apply the technology for best effect.
“My sense is that right now everyone is developing their measurement strategies differently,” he says. “I recently asked an architect at a big bank what he thought the greatest deficiency was in this market, expecting him to say mention a feature or capability; instead he said that best practice in the monitoring space is lacking. He observed that in a data centre the bank was building every aspect according to a best practice document, but when it comes to monitoring most firms are making up the process themselves.”
David Selby “In most cases the large banks we work with
are using the connectivity within their own trading strategies. A lot of the smaller traders that may
buy more of a managed service tend to go through a reseller or a systems integrator”
88 | july 2012 e-FOREX
Greene continues, “Something we at Endace are working on is developing best practices and making recommendations to people so they have appropriate visibility, the ability to diagnose issues and remedy them when they come about. Te other issue is that the whole industry of networking has spent a lot of effort on preventing problems and detecting problems. Te whole troubleshooting and response side has been under-invested.”
Schwartz also notes that, “For those who decide to deploy themselves (do-it-yourself), diagnosing concerns and issues becomes more of a challenge because of the rates that are involved, or the spikiness of the data. Tis is in addition to geographic or regional difficulties.
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