Since high-frequency trading took off 10 years ago the trading community has sought out new ways to gain advantage over their competitors. For buy-side, sell-side and trading venues, maximizing system performance and minimizing latency have become key tenants of technology strategies. Up until now, a key challenge has been how to test and measure the effectiveness of these strategies using real traffic.

Endace Capture Replay Systems enable organizations to record up to 16TB of market and trading data with 100 percent accuracy. Once recorded, traders can replay the traffic at any speed up to 10Gb/s with exactly the same time correlation and precisely the same packet sequence.

By replaying traffic at different rates organizations can:

* Identify the point that feed handlers and trading systems saturate and fail
* Diagnose technical faults by replaying trades
* Benchmark the performance of new algorithms against existing algorithms using real data
* Sample new markets by recording market data feeds from new venues and replaying them through trading systems under controlled conditions

"The benefits of being able to capture traffic with absolute accuracy and replay it with sub-micro second accuracy are extensive and will enable increased profitability in the trading community," said Kevin Formby, vice president of business development at Endace. "Many of our customers are at the bleeding edge of high-frequency trading and they are constantly on the lookout for new tools that will provide an advantage. In the right hands, these capture replay systems have the potential to give both traders and venues significant competitive gains through controlled replay."

Endace is launching two different versions of its Capture Replay System. A SAS-based system which supports write to disk speeds of 10Gb/s and 9.6TB of storage and a SATA-based system that supports 16TB of storage and a write to disk speed of 7Gb/s. Both systems can be configured with a fiber cd with a fiber channel HBA to enable larger trace files to be saved and recovered from network storage systems. For recording and playback, capture replay systems support a pair of 10Gb/s DAG® monitoring ports.

Capture Replay Systems enable captured traffic to be:

* Speeded up to a specified Gb/s rate
* Slowed down to replay at a specified Gb/s rate
* Scheduled to replay at a predefined time
* Speeded up or slowed down during a live transmission