Tervela TMX Message Switch

The Tervela TMX Message Switch™ is a purpose-built, silicon-accelerated messaging appliance that sits at the heart of the Tervela Message Network™. Unlike legacy, software-based messaging solutions, the TMX Message Switch helps overcome the business and information distribution challenges of the world’s most demanding customers and gives them: sustainable speed, continuous stability, and unlimited scalability. It interfaces to the Tervela TPM Provisioning & Management System™, external publishers and subscribers through the Tervela Client API™, companion TMX switches for message networking and fault tolerance, and direct data feeds to form a seamless, integrated, high-performance messaging platform. The TMX is powered by a customized operating system that contains the following core capabilities specific to messaging:

• Topic configuration
• Subscription quality-of-service management
• Entitlement control
• API authentication
• Protocol transformation
• Role management
• Multicast assignment

The Tervela operating system also supports functionality extension through the incorporation of business modules such as feed handlers. The TMX Message Switch currently supports several native feed handlers, such as the Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA), as well as many others through our business partners. Please contact us for a complete list.

Each switch has distinct control and data planes to ensure that administrative operations are separated from data flows, thereby ensuring high-performance operation. In the data plane, Tervela implemented patent-pending logic in silicon to handle unprecedented numbers of topics across dynamic and diverse message flows with automated filtering. This functionality makes certain that the underlying network and participating computer platforms only receive the information that they need. The TMX is engineered for rich, high-performance enterprise messaging that spans from work-group scale to massive, pan-organizational coverage. Benefits of deploying the TMX include:

• High-volume message throughput—Individual switch performance starts at 1.5 million messages-per-second, with additional substantial headroom to handle large data bursts. Interconnecting switches creates even higher capacity, and the Tervela Message Network has been tested to deliver over 10 million messages-per-second.
• Ultra-low latency—The TMX delivers published and verified sub-100 microsecond average latency well past specified forwarding capacity. Latency remains equally low and deterministic even during periods of volatility and data bursts.
• Operational predictability—Customized messaging hardware removes skew and jitter, thereby ensuring deterministic flows of messages to even the most time-sensitive applications.
• Platform offload—The TMX frees computing nodes of messaging management processing and overhead so that applications do not suffer from performance degradation.
• Decoupling—Publisher and subscribers are decoupled from one another so that any processing imbalances, such as slow consumers, do not adversely impact other participants in the message network.
• Transport optimization—Each switch can dynamically switch back and forth from multicast to unicast communications to ensure efficient use of network transport services and to liberate computer nodes from continually discarding unneeded messages.
• Data center efficiency—TMX obviates the need for intense topic partitioning to diverse servers and frees up rack space by reducing the messaging server footprint.
• Compatibility—The TMX is fully compatible with existing messaging infrastructures.

Find out more about deploying the TMX by reading about the Tervela TPM Provisioning & Management System™ and the Tervela Client API™, and see how it can be deployed today in real world solutions, including high-performance trading infrastructure, market data distribution, market making and order routing.