cPacket came out with news today about a new stream analysis and behavioral analytics product designed for trading exchanges and financial services firms.
cPacket offers tools for large-scale network operators as well as service providers to monitor the increasingly complex distributed systems they have. It also offers a distributed network of monitoring sensors that, in theory, allow these organizations to more quickly identify, and hence remedy, problems on the network. cPacket claims that its tooling can help reduce resolution times by up to 80 percent -- an impressive metric.
This is also a metric that will appeal hugely to users with particularly strong requirements for speed and reliability. A case in point being the financial services vertical.
Which is why cPacket is announcing cBurst. Promising to monitor 1,000 streams per port at a resolution of one-millisecond, cPacket promises far higher resolution than its competitors, and in doing so enables detection of microbursts and proactive alerts of imminent network performance issues.
The cBurst feature is integrated into the cPacket Intelligent Monitoring Fabric and leverages their cStor forensic storage arrays and cVu appliances, which are capable of 40G real-time line-rate performance analytics and complete packet inspection across L2-L7.
cPacket is already deployed into some of the world's largest trading exchanges, hence a further product enhancement for this sector makes total sense. It also helps that cPacket is aiding more distributed architectures, something that is becoming increasingly common generally across the technology landscape.
MyPOV
Clearly, the financial services industry is one area where time costs money -- the fact is that this market runs on sub-second transactions and any breakdown or performance degradation on the network can have major ramifications.
It is also the case that the financial services industry is, arguably, somewhat slower than other industries at adopting truly distributed architectures and patterns.
Part of the reason for this lack of adoption is the concerns around performance and control. It is for this reason that tools like cPacket, that help financial services organizations wrap monitoring and control around a more loosely coupled IT footprint, are increasingly attractive. cPacket states it accurately itself when it says that:
“For financial services firms, network performance and the cost of network downtime is serious business, where split seconds can potentially have million-dollar ramifications,” said cPacket CEO Brendan O’Flaherty. “As microbursts approach a network’s port capacity, they can become predictive indicators of imminent network issues before an outage occurs. Identifying problems in advance is extremely valuable, as it provides our customers with the ability to take corrective action before their user’s trades are impacted.”
Given its existing footprint in the vertical, and the overarching technological trends in the space, cBurst is a logical and helpful addition to financial services organizations toolkits.