DDN Said to Get Faster Performance Than Flash for Financial Services

Demonstrating the responsiveness and performance of DataDirect Network, Inc.‘s (DDN) big storage platform, the SFA12K-40, DDN announced new record results for financial analytics response times and corresponding throughput as reported by the Securities Technology Analysis Center LLC (STAC).

The audited STAC-M3 benchmark tests revealed that the SFA12K-40 (with a hybrid configuration of flash and spinning disk technology) delivered performance more than eight times faster than the traditional storage average and, in some cases, almost twice the performance of flash storage.

To gain a competitive edge, financial services companies rely on accelerated collection and analysis of trade data. With DDN systems, financial institutions can cost-effectively model massive data sets faster than disk- and flash-based storage solutions, making it possible to respond to market dynamics more quickly for improved trading, risk management and compliance agility. Such benefits can drive increased profitability and lower risk for hedge funds, proprietary trading firms and other financial institutions.

The tests evaluated single- and multi-year historical tick data involving complex financial modeling, designed by trading firms on the STAC Benchmark Council to reflect real-world computing demands of financial markets. The benchmark application in all cases compared was Kx Systems kdb+, in high-performance database and time series analysis. The DDN benchmark was run on IBM System x3850 M4 Express servers, with the latest Intel Xeon processors.

"Financial data analysts searching for insight among the thousands of incoming data sets need to be able to load, process and export data quickly. With a storage platform that can process larger and more numerous data sets at one time, analysts can implement real-time trading strategies and make informed decisions that add real business value. The STAC-M3 results validate what we already know – that DDN is a proven and powerful solution for today’s data intensive financial workflows, including pre- and post-trade analytics and risk management," said Jean-Luc Chatelain, EVP of strategy and technology, DDN.

"The speed at which a financial firm can process large amounts of data is increasingly critical to revenue. Storage speed-both latency and bandwidth-is often the bottleneck that determines how fast a firm can understand and respond to changing market conditions. The STAC-M3 Benchmark suite captures many elements of this challenge. We are pleased that DDN continues to improve its baseline STAC-M3 results and that it continues to disclose results for optional STAC-M3 tests that demonstrate how products scale with increasing data volumes and numbers of users," said Peter Lankford, founder and director of STAC.

"The STAC benchmarks are invaluable for financial institutions in providing objective performance measurement. They are useful for comparing apples to apples, and finding the fastest and most efficient hardware and software configuration. DDN has been implementing very large storage systems across different verticals for many years; this set of benchmarks demonstrates that these systems, running on the latest IBM and Intel hardware, can deliver impressive performances for financial institutions," said Simon Garland , Kx chief strategist.