Certichron Deploys Time Services on CFN's Alpha

Los Gatos, Calif.-based network time services provider Certichron is deploying its network synchronization and time-stamping services on network infrastructure provider CFN Services' cloud-based Alpha Platform of third-party data sources and trading services, to provide trading firms with NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) timestamps with sub-nanosecond accuracy to support precise data and transaction tracking for event correlations, latency monitoring and compliance purposes.

Certichron's CertifiedTime suite of time services -- which provides laboratory-grade access to the timebase maintained by the NIST, with support for Network Time Protocol (NTP), Precision Time Protocol (PTP), Pulse Per Second (PPS), Inter-range Instrumentation Group (IRIG)-B and IRIG-G time synchronization -- is now available at CFN's datacenters at 755 Secaucus Road in Secaucus, NJ and 350 East Cermak Road in Chicago, and will also be deployed across other Alpha sites, including other facilities in New Jersey, as well as the UK, São Paolo, Frankfurt, and Tokyo, says Todd Glassey, chief technology officer at Certichron.

Brad O'Brien, vice president of development at CFN, adds that while Alpha clients can access Certichron's timing service from any CFN datacenter by leveraging its low-latency distribution network, as the two vendors deploy CertifiedTime in more datacenters, firms co-located in those facilities gain an improved time source.

CertifiedTime essentially aims to create a set of "clones" of the timebase operated by NIST, as those are what regulatory requirements mandate the use of, and to place those instances adjacent to the systems that are using that time in order to remove latency from the distribution of time, Glassey says. Certichron's architecture creates a PNT (positioning, navigation and timing) ground segment, which also eliminates disruptions that GPS timing may encounter as a result of issues such as weather conditions, spoofing or jamming, he says.

High-frequency trading Alpha clients can leverage the service for more accurate latency monitoring by tracking the time a message originates to the time it reaches its destination, and comparing that to their expectations, O'Brien says.

Furthermore, other vendors providing services over Alpha can leverage CertifiedTime by incorporating it as part of their offering to clients, O'Brien adds. "For a ticker plant or feed handler provider, or anyone who's delivering data to someone that's focused on the speed at which that data or output is delivered, timing is relevant. It's not just an end-user market that we see as an opportunity for this solution. It's really the whole low-latency ecosystem," he says.

In addition, "the better the time data is in the market data being aggregated, the tighter the actual trading algorithms that rely on it can be built, because we remove the uncertainty in the time data around a lot of those processes," Glassey says.

Although regulator FINRA's Order Audit Trail System (OATS) 7430 rule requires firms to maintain clocks and time-stamping devices accurate to within one second of the NIST clock, "in reality, algo trading needs as much accuracy as it can get and as tight a coupling to the time sources as possible, so our accuracy is better than one nanosecond," Glassey says. "Having secure, reliable, provable time is critical for financial firms, and this alliance with CFN is a first step in providing that to a large portion of the trading framework in one fell swoop."