“One half second too slow or too fast and you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in every break of the game, every minute, every second.”
Tony D’Amato, Coach of the Miami Sharks

Coach D’Amato’s rousing speech to his embattled Miami Sharks football team in the 1999 Hollywood blockbuster, “Any Given Sunday” is one of the most often-quoted ever to appear on the silver screen.

That same year, High Frequency Trading (HFT) burst onto the financial services scene in the United States, giving fast-acting traders and investors the potential to reap massive financial rewards from the tiniest market movements.

Although the head of any High Frequency Trading firm could be forgiven for delivering a similar speech to their IT team, he or she would most likely express time in milli- or micro-seconds rather than whole numbers or halves.

That’s because the speedy delivery of “Buy” or “Sell” signals to stock exchanges is critical to the success of a firm’s HFT strategy. And reducing the lag (latency) between data sent and data received all boils down to the performance of the networks and servers being used to deliver the information.

So technology firms around the globe spend countless man-hours of research and development to engineer, refine, test, and re-refine HFT networks and servers with the lowest latency times on the market.

As for their efforts at reducing latency however, IT engineers also have to build turbo-charged HFT servers with a variety of other design and operational factors to consider.

Design Considerations and Inches Vs. Milliseconds

(It’s at this point, that a better sporting parallel might be drawn with the Ferrari Formula One team fine-tuning an engine rather than the fictional “Miami Sharks” chasing inches on a football field, but how and ever…)

 

Introducing XENON’s eXtreme Range

Closer to home than the Ferrari research facilities in Italy, HFT servers such as XENON’s are competing against – and beating – some of the biggest and strongest international suppliers on the market.

With the development of their eXtreme HFT server range, XENON entered the market with an offering that delivers excellent performance, reliability, durability, and ultimately speed – all contained in a compact unit with a form factor of just 2U.

Successfully tried and tested in XENON labs, the eXtreme server line has now met and matched real-world HFT conditions for paying customers across Australia, Asia and the Americas. This initial product offering also saw eXtreme servers deliver a latency level 30% lower than off-the-shelf standards, providing a competitive edge to clients in a sector that runs on razor-thin, massive-yield returns.

Moreover, the eXtreme HFT server range also represents the first in a pedigree of upcoming, low-latency HFT servers due to be rolled-out to market by XENON in the closing months of 2014. AND these new additions to the eXtreme HFT server family will be trimmer than their parents, boasting a form factor of just 1U while delivering more cores and faster clock speeds.

So the next time you’re impressed by the sight of a multi-million dollar Ferrari shaving a half-second off an F1 lap-record, spare a thought for the less-flashy but much, much faster technology that can make a million dollars in a millionth of a second.

If you’d like to learn more about XENON’s HFT solutions, please contact us or call 1300 888 030.

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