Load Balancing Acts For Market Data Becoming Common In Trading Rooms

NEW YORK--Load balancing safeguards are becoming standard additions to the market data distribution networks of high-volume trading floors and Web-based trading systems, as evidenced by the recent endorsements of Hydraweb Technologies by Bridge Information Systems and Reuters.

Bridge recently announced that it agreed to incorporate Hydraweb's load balancing technology into Bridgechannel, Bridge's Internet-based market data delivery offering for workstations. Hydraweb's load balancing system works over IP-based networks by routing requests for information in real time to the servers that are most able to accept them. This, the company says, improves the availability of electronic data delivery via IP.

Toward this goal, Bridge has developed applets for the Bridge Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agent that enable Hydraweb's API to work with Bridge's application servers.

"The use of load balancing applications in electronic trading environments is evolving," says David Mendenhall, vice president of marketing for New York-based Hydraweb, a load balancing product provider. Mendenhall says more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 securities firms and three of the top four market data distribution companies currently use load balancing to enable faster and more reliable delivery of market data information, and many have chosen Hydraweb for the task.

Load balancers such as those offered by Hydraweb run against Reuters' Triarch digital data distribution platforms as well as the market data delivery systems from Bridge/Telerate (formerly Dow Jones Markets) and ILX Systems, says Mendenhall, adding that discussions are underway with Bloomberg for similar projects.

"There is already widespread use of the load balancer running against Triarch," Mendenhall says. In fact, Reuters added modifications to Triarch's Source/Sink Library (SSL) distribution API base code to run Hydraweb's system--similar in principle to the Bridge applets.

Small-shop Reuters clients using the Triarch data distribution system or any of the 3000 series products (as well as the dial-up solution Reuters Mobile) can now gain offsite access via a central "server farm" to Reuters data. The initiative, internally dubbed "Blade Runner", required Hydraweb's load balancing capabilities and resulted in the creation of Reuters 3000 IP. The change allows Reuters to offer its 3000 series support infrastructure far from client sites for delivery to smaller users over a single IP-based pipe (Inside Market Data, June 15). A Reuters spokesperson described the Blade Runner project, which went live in early August, as "another distribution option" for Reuters customers.

"Sometimes, if you're a small operation, you may not want the added expense of on-site data, or you may not want to manage any technology on your site," says the Reuters spokesperson. "Through this service, we're responsible for everything."

The "server farm" hosts a Reuters Triarch 2000 digital data distribution platform. Load balancing distributes the information queries coming in and the information going out, keeping the path clear. "When you're managing a big operation of servers, you want to make sure they are functioning efficiently so that each is carrying an equal load and their function can be maximized," the Reuters spokesperson says.

Securities industry firms that employ load balancers on their floors include Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ). DLJ employs Hydraweb's technology to balance transactions and data from DLJdirect, the investment company's Web-based e-commerce retail-trading link. Load balancing is currently employed across DLJdirect's 11 separate Web servers, and plans are underway to expand the load-balancing capabilities for its back-office application servers (TTW, June 29).

Among the other proponents of load balancing technology is the London-based International Trading Room Software (ITRS), maker of the Netagent Triarch monitoring system. (see related story, this issue.) Officials from ITRS worked closely with Reuters to develop Netagent, and Reuters promotes the product as a monitoring tool for its Triarch clients. ITRS also offers Loadbalance Manager (LBM) expressly for Triarch systems.

As LANs and intranets expand both in size and function, load balancing has become a concern in real-time environments like trading floors. In a Triarch environment, for example, market data is typically routed through SSL distributors, and network administrators must statically map each broker to two specific SSL distributors as well as two IP addresses. Should a distributor fail, a backup comes on-line.

With Hydraweb load balancing, all broker transactions are routed through the Hydraweb balancer, which does not work alone. A second Hydraweb is co-located on the network to avoid a single point of failure. Additionally, the load balancer "monitors" the data traffic and attempts to balance it among distributors so as to not overwhelm any one distributor and slow down the network. Broker requests are distributed to the most available SSL distributor when an information request is made.