FairEx achieves seamless "e-fx" trading with Fiorano Enterprise Backbone solutions

Customer Profile FairEx develops high quality, cutting edge web-based financial systems solutions for the banking and financial industries. FairEx offers a full range of products to achieve seamless e-fx trading for any level of trading. From turnkey solutions to intricate custom build projects, FairEx provides the technology that enables its clients to deliver reliable, scalable and leading edge e-banking solutions and services at internet speed.

"Our online trading system makes extensive use of JMS to send different types of messages among the different components, these components are deployed on several hardware, and it is critical that we have a high performance messaging backbone to dispatch the messages. We have tested several JMS servers, and Fiorano is among the top in terms of performance/ throughput in our evaluation, and we are also very satisfied with their technical support, the response is fast whenever we have any queries." C.K Lim,Chief Architect, FairEx International Financial Systems

Business Problem
FairEx Virtual Trading Engine, the most powerful web-based exchange mechanism that not only performs lightning fast order matching, but is bundled with some of the most critical credit and risk control mechanisms; facilitating safe and secured transactions. FairEx always understood that they could offer greater benefits to customers if they could send information more securely, reliably and at a greater speed.

FairEx Trading Engine uses a lot of inter-component messaging; Uses topics (text and serialized objects) and queues. Messages get published from the web server to Order Matching Server (OMS), from the EJB container to the OMS, and from the OMS to the WebServer. Within these 3 sub systems, there are intensive message publishing and subscribing, the topics ranging from heart beat, rate feed, order and trade confirmation, etc. Hence having a reliable and scalable JMS server became a critical component in the entire FairEx trading system. FairEx needed a JMS solution that would allow them to move data through various paths, some sequential and some parallel in a reliable and secure manner.

Some of the key requirements for a JMS solution included:

• Scalability - can scale vertically and horizontally
• Reliability - will not crash under heavy load
• Very fast performance
• Ability to tune and configure the transport details, tools to monitor the server performance
• Ability to cluster servers

The solution should have the ability to publish and subscribe several hundreds of messages per second without crashing under load. Most of these messages were text (strings), and a few were serializable objects. "The uptime of the server had to be solid" said C.K Lim, Chief Architect at FairEx.

Solution
FairEx had several critical requirements that needed to be met by the proposed solution:

• Fast performance for text and serialized object messages, was critical for their trading engine to dispatch the volatile forex prices to several machines in the web server farm
• Assurance that performance levels do not deteriorate particularly under heavy load conditions was important
• Clustering Architecture
• Responsive Technical Support

In intensive evaluations conducted by FairEx, FioranoMQ proved to be the fastest and most scalable JMS server for guaranteed message delivery. It performed reliably under heavy load conditions making FioranoMQ the Backbone Middleware solution of choice for FariEx.

FioranoMQ provided precisely the kind of messaging solution that FairEx needed. Fiorano's file based data store delivers guaranteed messages significantly faster in publish/subscribe mode than any other JMS implementation, which was a key requirement of FairEx's trading infrastructure. In addition, Fiorano's highly configurable, multi-level security system adds Java REALMS support to improve security management by centralizing and combining user authentication sources. Another key feature was FioranoMQ's reliability. The ability to withstand heavy load to tune and configure the transport details to monitor the server performance was seen as something unique to FioranoMQ.

FIGURE1: FairEx Trading Engine Overall Architecture

Only FioranoMQ used a Scalable Connection Management Module (SCM) to achieve scalability levels unmatched by any other JMS (Java Message Service) vendor.

The FioranoMQ cluster can share destinations and provide load-balancing facilities. The FioranoMQ clustering architecture incorporates automatic failover protection thus reducing, infact, almost eliminating server downtime. If any of the servers in a cluster goes down, the client application automatically reconnects to the dispatcher FairEx's trading engine is deployed on Java 2 Enterprise Edition, using technologies such as JSP, EJB, JMS, JNDI, etc. In some cases, FairEx also uses JMS to integrate two partner systems together.

Benefits
Implementing their solution with Fiorano, FairEx achieved several important business related goals leading to cost effectiveness and improved profitability through enhanced productivity.

Speed and reliability added to the customer experience and allowed FairEx to focus on its core competencies thereby providing an attractive return on investment. Says C.K Lim, Chief Architect with FairEx International Financial Systems. "We have tested several JMS servers, and Fiorano was among the top in terms of performance/ throughput in our evaluation. We are also very satisfied with their technical support, the response is fast whenever we have any queries."

FairEx's online trading engine requires dispatching different types of messages among the different components, deployed on several hardware. It was critical that FairEx have a scalable and high performance messaging backbone to dispatch these messages. FioranoMQ – a JMS compliant server allowed them to move data through various paths, both sequential and in parallel both reliably and securely.

About Fiorano Software
Fiorano Software (www.fiorano.com) is a leading provider of enterprise class business process integration and messaging infrastructure technology. Fiorano's network-centric solutions set a new paradigm in ROI, performance, interoperability and scalability. Global leaders including Fortune 500 companies such as Boeing, British Telecom, Credit Agricole Titres, Lockheed Martin, NASA, POSCO, Qwest Communications, Schlumberger and Vodafone among others have used Fiorano technology to deploy their enterprise nervous systems.

To find out more about how Fiorano can help you meet your enterprise integration objectives, visit www.fiorano.com or Email us, we will contact you!