19 October 2007
B2BITS upgrades FIX connectivity product
B2BITS Corp, the leading provider of technology for FIX connectivity, is pleased to announce the new major version of its flagship product - FIX Antenna 2.0.
B2BITS FIX Antenna is a fast, reliable and highly customizable solution for FIX connectivity. It is available for different operating systems (Windows, Linux, Solaris), different languages and technologies (C++, .NET). The maturity of the product is proven by numerous satisfied customers choosing B2BITS FIX Antenna in the course of many years. FIX Antenna is currently integrated into many mission critical highly reliable systems.
Alexander Rivkind, the CTO of B2BITS, said "version 2.0 is a result of focused work by our team of engineers for more than a year. We paid specific attention to the current and future market latency requirements and added many features which improve operational usability of the product."
Primary improvements and changes:
- Performance and latency related: On mid-level hardware, it is able to process about 35000 messages per second (throughput). The latency is about 0.001 milliseconds. The ability to prioritize sending and receiving of messages has been added. The application can now spend more system resources for sending messages delaying receiving of messages or vice versa. Increase in performance reaches 30% in typical settings. Latency is significantly improved in the new version.
- Multiple FIX versions support: FIX version 5.0 is fully supported.
- FIX Dialects support: FIX Antenna supports many FIX dialects used by various exchanges. The user can define his own dialect in XML and configure FIX Antenna to load it. To deliver the highest performance B2BITS can compile an XML defined dialect for customers.
- FAST support: FIX Antenna supports latest version of FAST - 1.1.
- Persistence vs. Performance: FIX Antenna supports standard FIX recovery mechanism. In cases when recovery after failure is not required, transient sessions can be used, which are typically two times faster than persistent sessions.
- Multiple sessions: There is no restriction on the number of sessions for FIX Antenna. It leverages multi-CPU architecture for the most efficient use of threads. With the growing number of sessions, the delay due to thread switching becomes significant, thus it is recommended to use not more than 200 concurrent sessions for the single FIX Antenna instance.
- Integrated FIXopaedia: Reflection gives the application code access to FIX dictionary in run-time. With this newly introduced API, validation and message transformation becomes much more flexible and simpler.
- Backup connection: FIX Antenna supports two separate connection points for the single FIX session. User can specify a backup host and port to switch between primary and backup connections transparently. FIX session is not affected by such switching.
- Run-time statistics: FIX Antenna 2.0 provides real-time statistical information about sessions and message processing.
Available APIs - FIX Antenna 2.0 is available for C++ and .NET 1.1/2.0, for Windows, Linux and Solaris.
Packaging - FIX Antenna 2.0 comes with API documentation, programming guide, which covers all aspects of library usage with examples and samples on C++, Java, C#, MC++, VB.NET, and Delphi.NET.
Licensing - The new license system used in FIX Antenna 2.0 enables B2BITS to offer flexible cost models. With the new license system, FIX Antenna becomes an affordable solution for any budget.