The software company demonstrated this performance by running a full day of data from OPRA, the US options market, on a single Intel-based server available in a single rack unit (1U) form factor. For any company concerned with the amount of hardware typically needed to process market data and other high volume payloads within the capital markets, this middleware, Wombat Data Fabric, sets a new high water mark combination of throughput, latency reduction and server efficiency.

"Firms throughout the street have been struggling with incredible growth in messaging this year," observed Brad Bailey, Senior Analyst at Aite Group. "There are few firms, on either the buy- or sell-side, that have not been reviewing their messaging infrastructure and considering how to achieve far greater throughput and server density."

Wombat's tests utilized a full day of OPRA traffic. The OPRA feed handler, running on a 2 socket, 8 core Intel 5400 Xeon server, published all updates on all symbols to MAMA clients across a single Voltaire network switch. Average CPU utilization was merely 10%, escalating to less than 35% at peaks with a mean latency of less than 100 microseconds. No specialty or proprietary hardware devices, such as FPGA cards, are required by the solution, lowering cost and complexity when compared with alternative "appliance" approaches.

The critical ingredient driving the solution's performance is Wombat Data Fabric, the first middleware to abandon the limits of pub/sub networking by embracing a new distributed memory sharing architecture. Significantly, Wombat has integrated this new middleware with Wombat's widely used MAMA API. As a result, all Wombat applications, including 140+ feed handlers, DART Entitlements, and SuperBook, are supported on Wombat Data Fabric from day one of launch later this month. And the hundreds of customer applications written to MAMA 4 can be ported across to Wombat Data Fabric without any need for code changes.

"The algorithmic trading community has made it clear - escalating volumes demand a new approach to radically lower the data center investments current technologies impose. The challenge has been how to marry that innovation with the low risk and cost of commodity hardware and proven software solutions," noted Wombat COO Danny Moore. "We've integrated our Wombat Data Fabric middleware under the hood of the same MAMA 4 API in use today to deliver breakthrough performance with battle-tested software, on the standard, affordable servers customers know and trust."

Wombat Data Fabric is currently in a limited, fully subscribed pilot program and soon to be generally available.