Kx and Vexata Break Records in STAC Benchmarks of Tick Data Analytics

  • Data
  • 16.05.2017 09:45 am

Kx Systems (Kx), a subsidiary of First Derivatives (FD) plc and provider of the industry-leading kdb+ time series database, and Vexata, the leader in high performance enterprise storage systems, announced record shattering results in independent testing by the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC®).

With kdb+ running on Intel x86 multi-core processors using the Vexata Array with NVMe Flash SSDs, the solution set new records in 8 of 17 baseline STAC-M3™ benchmarks (the Antuco suite), and 14 of 24 benchmarks in the STAC-M3 scaling suite (Kanaga). The joint solution was able to achieve 36.8 GB/s of effective application-level throughput in bandwidth-intensive year-high bid tests. The solution also shattered existing records for several read-IO intensive queries like volume-weighted average bid, as well as balanced compute and IO workloads like statistical calculations.*

In the era of Big Fast Data analytics, kdb+ has set industry benchmarks for speed and stability in high performance applications. It is widely used in the financial services industry for trading and risk management platforms and across a range of markets such as manufacturing, pharma, the Industrial Internet of Things, utilities and retail which face similarly demanding data challenges. Kx is also at the forefront of the use of predictive analytics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to drive operational intelligence and provide actionable insights.

The Vexata Array, built on Vexata’s breakthrough Real Time Architecture, enables Enterprises to realize an order of magnitude higher performance and scale from their Database and Analytics platforms. Vexata Arrays can be deployed simply and seamlessly into existing SAN environments and alongside existing storage. The Vexata Array is in production and available in a range of capacities at market leading economics.

Glenn Wright, Systems Architect for Kx added: “These results show the mutual benefits gained by placing the latest technology alongside kdb+. What stood out are the streaming I/O performance results, alongside some very good results for discrete market data set queries. This should be particularly appealing to those customers wishing to consolidate their market data on a single storage device being shared between multiple analytics systems, for example between different business functions or business units of an organization.”

Peter Lankford, Director of STAC, said: "Trading firms designed the STAC-M3 benchmark suite to represent a common set of performance-related challenges in financial time-series analytics. Competition requires capital markets organizations around the world to analyze more data in less time. This combination of Kx software and the Fibre Channel-based Vexata NVMe Flash Array established many new STAC-M3 records while running at large scale. “

Zahid Hussain, CEO of Vexata said: “We are very pleased to be working closely with Kx to provide a compelling high performance solution stack that enterprises can immediately deploy for their stock-ticker Analytics. The STAC-M3 results clearly showcase the unique performance benefits achievable through the Kx-Vexata solution.”

Mark Sykes, COO at Kx said: “Kx’s customers are always looking to increase performance for complex analytics on very large datasets. The approach taken by Vexata allows them to do this without the need for them to invest in a large storage system in order to achieve the results they want, lowering their total cost of ownership.”

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