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Vhayu Introduces Hardware Compression for Its Tick Database to Shrink Data 75%

Combining Vhayu Velocity with an FPGA, Squeezer compresses data by a factor of four with no performance penalty, says the vendor.

Vhayu Technologies (booth #1430) has added a hardware compression feature to its high-speed tick database, which is used by hedge funds and sell-side firms to receive data feeds from exchanges, normalize the data, and perform high-speed queries and analytics on the data. The hardware compression will shrink data down to a quarter of its original size on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) without slowing down data delivery, according to the vendor. (An FPGA is an integrated circuit that can be programmed in the field after manufacture.)

"Some of our customers have 40 to 100 terabytes of tick data," says Vhayu CEO Jeff Hudson. "One thing we've known for a long time is that the volume of data is growing at a rate far faster than most people are willing to admit, and even when they do admit it, they're not sure what they're going to do about it. They can't throw it away because they need it for compliance reasons to prove best execution and they need it for quant research. So the question is, with all this data coming at our customers, how are they going to store it? The physical storage of this data used in real, live applications is getting to be an onerous chore."

Hudson contends that market data volumes are growing so fast that software-only solutions are dead. "It's a hybrid software/hardware world we're entering now, and those companies that embrace it will prosper and those that don't will fall way behind," he asserts.

Vhayu's new product, which has been in development for 18 months, according to Hudson, is called Squeezer. It combines Vhayu Velocity, the company's tick database, with an FPGA that can be plugged into a server's standard PCI slot.

Squeezer takes the data coming into Velocity and "squeezes" it by a factor of four, with no performance penalty, Hudson says, so that the data still can be used for algorithmic trading, quantitative research or compliance in real time. Hudson declines to specify which compression algorithm Vhayu uses in Squeezer, except to say that it's well-known and widely available.

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