From the Gaming Scalability event, June 2009 in London (http://gamingscalability.org). Today's electronic markets are demanding lower and lower end-to-end latency. The acceptable time from an event occurring to reporting the effect of the event to consumers around the world has gone down to seconds and even sub-second in some cases. This presentation shows how the combination of an Enterprise Data Fabric inside the firewall and Push Technology for delivery over the Internet ("the last mile") can effectively address this problem and turn it into competitive advantage. Christian James is the product manager of Push Technology's high performance and low latent messaging product suite Diffusion. Christian leverages his knowledge and experience of the delivery of e-Commerce/betting and trading platforms, within the sports and financial markets, to expand and align Push Technology's product offering to the gaming fraternity. Prior to joining Push Technology Christian was head of IT for Cantor Spreadfair, a peer to peer spread betting exchange, and, prior to that, a lead within Deutsche Bank's FX e-Commerce team responsible for the design and development of Deutsche Bank's award winning autobahn�FX e-Commerce trading platform. Mike Stolz is vice president of architecture and strategy for financial services at GemStone Systems. In his role, Stolz leverages his expertise in targeting, developing and delivering innovative technology solutions to expand GemStone's global financial services offering and cultivate its growing capital markets division. During the ten years prior to joining GemStone Stolz served as director and chief architect of Merrill Lynch's global markets and investment banking debt division. In this role, Stolz was responsible for the design and development of trading systems and trading support systems for Fixed Income, Currencies, Commodities, Liquidity and Risk.

1. Going The Extra Mile
Christian James Mike Stolz
Product Manager VP of Architecture
Push Technology Ltd GemStone Systems Inc.

2. Agenda
• Demands within the betting industry
• What is latency
• The cost of latency
• Combating latency
• GemFire/Diffusion solution
• Q&A

3. Demanding and competitive environment
Technology drives competitive advantage

4. Demanding business requirements
and drivers
• Speed, Stability, Scalability
• Increase the number of markets offered
• The ability to offer more volatile markets
• Deliver to more channels
• Improved marketing/advertising capabilities
• Minimize unmatched orders/bets
• Global distribution and real-time replication
• Localized Data creating better user experience
• Cost effective

5. Latency is everywhere
What is latency?

6. Total latency equals
Disk access
+
Sender overhead
+
Time of flight
+
Message size/Bandwidth **
+
Receiver overhead
** Potentially misleading

7. E-Betting flow…
Bet rejected
No No
100s of Web
Accept & Yes Yes Can User
Valid Bet?
Place Bet Afford Bet?
Servers
Book
Odds
Position/
Risk Monitor Repository
Database

8. …has many sources of latency
Bet rejected
No No
100s of Web
Accept & Yes Yes Can User
Valid Bet?
Place Bet Afford Bet?
Servers
Book
Odds
Position/
Risk Monitor Repository
Database

9. Why worry about it
It Costs!

10. The cost of ignoring it is high,
and its not just trading systems
• Amazon – every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in
sales
• Google – an extra 0.5 seconds in search page
generation time dropped traffic by 20%
• Financial – “If a broker’s electronic trading platform is 5
ms behind the competition it could loose them at least
1% of their flow – that’s $4 million in revenues per ms”
(TABB Group)

11. Latency reduces revenue, causes losses and results in a
poor end-user experience
Lost £££ Bet Rejected (Lost Revenue £££)
Difference in odds X amt . No No
100s of Web
Accept & Yes Yes Can User
Valid Bet?
Place Bet Afford Bet?
Servers
Book
Odds
Position/
Risk Monitor Repository
Database

12. Money is lost as bets are rejected or
taken at poor prices
Odds generated, odds offered 10 to 1
Bet placed for £10 @ 10 to 1
Bet booked, odds now being offered 5 to 1
End client wins
Payout is
£100
versus
£50
In-running greatly amplifies this effect

13. Operating costs are high as architecture
is inefficient
Lost £££ Bet Rejected (Lost Revenue £££)
Difference in odds X amt . No No
100s of Web
Accept & Yes Yes Can User
Valid Bet?
Place Bet Afford Bet?
Servers
Book
Odds
Position/
Risk Monitor Repository
Database

14. Budgets are being wasted on OPEX rather than
advancing the business via CAPEX
• 60-70% of IT budgets spent on operational costs (CIO
Magazine)
• 5% of IT budgets spend on energy (BBC)
• 1996-2006 no. of servers in London increased from 6 
28m.
• Avg. power consumption of each increased from 150 
400 watts.
• In 2007 it was predicted London would run out of
power in 2009

15. “Latency Exists, Cope!” (Dan Pritchett)
Combating it:
Hardware or software?

16. Moore’s law hasn’t held up for hardware speed gains,
they are slowing
Speed of light
Network
Speed
CPU Clock Speed, Moore’s law
Ram Speed (limited to distance from CPU) still exists (for how long)
but for different reasons – plus
Memory/RAM Wall broken
Desk I/O PS
Date

17. Bandwidth should also be a cause
for concern…
• “Net bombs” are gobbling up the internet
– YouTube = using the same amount of traffic as the entire
internet in 2000
– iPlayer 5% of UK internet usage.
• Monthly internet traffic is running at 8 exabytes (million
trillion) – one exabyte is equivalent of 50,000 years of
DVDs
• 2007 traffic grew by 75%, capacity by 45%
• Brownouts/jitters are due to start in 2010
• What is the alternative?

18. How we tackle it
Faster software running on fewer
machines
"Hardware can give you a generic 20 percent improvement
in performance, but there is only so far you can go with
hardware. “ Rob Wallos, global head of market data Citi

19. GemFire & Diffusion kill inefficiencies reducing costs
and increasing revenue
Lost £££ Bet Rejected (Lost Revenue £££)
Difference in odds X amt . No No
Accept & Yes Yes Can User
Valid Bet?
Place Bet Afford Bet?
Diffusion
Book
Position/
Risk Monitor
Odds
Repository GemFire
Database
GemFire looks after the first miles… …and Diffusion the last

20. In essence, a suite of low latency
communication products
• GemFire allows you to create a highly resilient, elastic, enterprise data
fabric to improve performance while simplifying your architecture.
• GemFire enables you to safe-store and receive data and events to and
from any back-end data source and pass notifications off to Diffusion.
GemFire – Enterprise Data Fabric

21. In essence, a suite of low latency
communication products
• Diffusion allows you to create a two-way secure real-time online channel
between an organisation and its audience.
• Diffusion enables you to push and receive data and events to and from any
current, or future, “net” connected device including the web browser.
Diffusion – the power behind the Net

22. Smaller messages optimally delivered, reducing
latency and foot print
• Best Message Delivery (BDM)
– Conflation
– High/Low Water Marks
– Throttling (could be used to level the ‘playing field’)
• Compression
• Your own message format avoids unnecessary
transformation/serialization
• Only send deltas - reduces size/amount of data sent
• Hierarchical topics - reduces size/amount sent to finest grain
• Connecting various devices – browser/mobile/interactive TV etc.
• These techniques can reduce bandwidth consumption by
up-to 80% and help achieve a better end-user experience

23. Hierarchical topics, in context of a
betting exchange

24. Strong focus on performance & efficiency,
driven from the server
• NIO technology ensures data moves through Diffusion
& GemFire as quickly as possible
• Zero Copy
• Zero Fan-out
• Bi-directional, no need to open another socket when
sending information (executing a bet) back to the
server as you would with a web request
• Scaling the application (massive number of clients on a
single server)
• These approaches can massively reduce your
hardware requirements

25. Global Edge Caching ensures most efficient client connectivity without
replicating the whole application environment

26. Questions & Answers