Financial applications that depend on moving data across large distances are being coupled with specialized messaging technology to improve performance.

“Markets are quickly going global, and global competitiveness is driving companies to set up regional operations, and share data globally,” J. Barry Thompson, chief technology officer and founder of Tervela, told Markets Media. “The need to have globally coordinated data centers means that businesses require high-performance, highly-reliable data networks between them.”

Geographically dispersed high-speed trading and regulatory compliance are driving the adoption of data fabric technology.

A data fabric is a logical data layer that overlays a company’s existing networks and data sources including databases or cloud services. It eliminates the need for application developers to write their own layers of functionality.

Customers overlay Tervela’s hardware and software appliances on top of existing feeds, databases, and cloud services to build high-performing distributed applications.

“The data fabric helps customers building large-scale applications in the cloud to embed real-time, streamed information to clients and throughout their cloud-based application, and make substantial improvements to back-end technology and roll it out quickly, with far less cost and risk,” Thompson said.

“A data fabric provides high-performing, no-loss access to data,” Thompson said. “Most, if not all, applications in financial markets require this functionality in order to distribute data efficiently and securely across the globe.”

Regulatory compliance requires reliable record-keeping for what’s happening across these diverse regions. Some of the most common uses of a data fabric in financial markets are market data, order book and pricing distribution, tick database synchronization, order routing, and real-time analytics.

“Regulations are creating the need to document more information, but companies don’t want to slow their applications down when doing this,” said Thompson. “The data fabric lets customers guarantee delivery of these events on a prioritized network that doesn’t impact, and in fact accelerates, operational performance.”

The heart of the system is the Tervela Message Switch (TSM), which makes real-time transport decisions, moving topics in and out of multicast groups while dynamically optimizing which topics are sent out on specific multicast groups.

Tervela is an alternative to open-source messaging platforms like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ, he said.

“It is much faster and includes significant features in security and fault-tolerance,” Thompson said. All of this makes it much easier for developers to create applications because Tervela’s services eliminate the need for them to write their own security, fault-tolerance, and other subsystems.”