- Delivers sustained 100Gbps real-time processing to handle the most demanding market data and enterprise network environments –

Pico, a leading provider of mission critical technology, data and analytic services for the financial markets community, continues to advance the capabilities of its performance monitoring and analytics solution, Corvil Analytics, for electronic financial markets with the launch of a new flagship appliance, the Corvil 10000.

In today’s competitive, complex, and evolving trading environment maintaining performant trading infrastructure and robust monitoring systems for network transparency and data insights is paramount.  The exponential increase in trading and data volumes, particularly since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, has accelerated this need for higher capacity infrastructure with up to four times faster initial uptake for 100Gbps deployments when compared to the previous transition to 40Gbps infrastructure ^[1].  A new generation of high-performance analytics and data capture is required as the uptake of 100Gbps ethernet increases.

The Corvil 10000 establishes a new high bar for sustained throughput, with Corvil’s real-time accuracy and granularity hallmarks, to support the ever-increasing trading and data volumes in financial markets. Highlights include:

• Sustained 100Gbps capture of packets for a forensic record of all network activity with real-time indexing to enable search, filter, and export of the packets of interest, on a single 2U unit
• Accurate record including native hardware timestamping and support for third party timestamping by the leading packet brokers, also sustained at 100Gbps
• Network Analytics for 100 percent of packets and flows – this includes TCP analytics for all flows with no topping and gap detection for more than 400 feeds
• Publishing of all flow analytics in real-time into third party data repositories (e.g., ElasticSearch) with support for up to 8 million active flows
• Multiple storage configurations ranging from 92TB – 660TB are available offering capacity and price flexibility

Corvil Analytics is used by the world’s largest banks, exchanges, electronic market makers, quantitative hedge funds, data service providers and brokers and has a twenty plus year legacy in extracting and correlating technology and transaction performance intelligence from dynamic network environments.  The Corvil 10000 continues this legacy delivering the ability to capture data at high speeds and high volumes while providing analytics and visibility to support the continuity of trading technology performance, execution and trading performance as well as quick and accurate responses to regulatory inquiries.

“The Corvil 10000 appliance marks a significant evolution that equips clients with the analytics throughput to take on current and future traffic rates. In context, this unit can capture the entire US equities market, and US futures market, including OPRA A and B feeds for gap detection on one single appliance,” said Roland Hamann, Chief Technology Officer & Head of APAC at Pico. “The 10000 is the fastest selling Corvil product we have ever launched, reflecting the need for insight-powered performance as 100Gbps network adoption continues at a rapid pace.”

Corvil is deployed on Pico’s resilient proprietary network, PicoNet™, a globally comprehensive, low-latency and fully redundant network connecting major financial data centers with access to major public cloud providers. Pico recently introduced a 100Gbps pure optical backbone network in North America, and the Corvil 10000 is central to providing transparency into network performance and real-time telemetry for this higher capacity network.

Pico’s Corvil Analytics have exclusively used Intel’s processor architecture for more than twenty years with the new 10000 appliance leveraging Intel’s latest 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors.  Pico collaborated closely with Intel’s microprocessor team to maximize this processor’s new features and capabilities.

The Corvil 10000 is available to order now with units ready for certification and performance testing.

Pico/Athena

On August 4, 2021, Pico announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement for a business combination with FTAC Athena Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: FTAA), a special purpose acquisition company. Upon closing of the transaction, the combined company will operate as Pico. The transaction reflects a pro forma enterprise value for the combined company of approximately $1.4 billion. The business combination, which has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Pico and FTAC Athena, is targeted to close in late 2021, subject to stockholder approvals and other customary closing conditions.