Risk mitigation for financial trading time tracking

11/02/2012

TimeKeeper brings to bear a significant technological advantage in reducing the risks to financial trading systems from fragility of time distribution and synchronization.

TimeKeeper:

Financial trading firms are learning from bitter experience that unmanaged technology risk issues can be costly. Time management and synchronization must be part of any effort to manage technology risk. When trades are moving at sub- microsecond speed, equivalent precision in timing networks is a non-negotiable necessity.
Time management risks are magnified both by “time sync client” software that is not designed to any rigorous level of engineering and by weakness or failure in the clocks or communication network. 

Timing errors have been covered up by synchronization software that is notorious for: optimistic self-evaluation, weak quality checking and lack of error reporting. And timing problems, especially at the microsecond or lower level, are invisible to standard network management tools. TimeKeeper® changes all that. As users have discovered, it doesn’t just synchronize and distribute time to sub-microsecond accuracy. It also polices the network in the course of monitoring and logging time quality, and providing failover resilience to failing time sources.

Here are examples:

Case 1: Errors being sent to applications. In a pilot set-up, TimeKeeper identified significant fluctuation from a time source in the data center. The prospective customer discovered that the old synchronization software was adjusting network time without any checks or warnings and providing incorrect time to applications.