Beeks Analytics is architected to take advantage of standard off-the-shelf commercially available servers and FPGA cards to provide horizontally scalable performance that can deal with the broadest range of financial market traffic volumes.

Capture cards

Napatech cards are used as the capture cards for VMX-Capture. They provide:

• Deep buffers, to provide highest fidelity capture.

• The ability to take in PTP and/or PPS time signals (if required - Beeks Analytics can also decode packet aggregator timestamps)

• The ability to separate traffic into distinct streams at the Napatech FPGA layer - this has the benefit of offloading this task from the server CPU, providing greater scalability and ability to balance traffic between PMUXs.

The ability to balance traffic between streams is a key element of the open scaling foundational principle of the Beeks Analytics architecture.

One or more Napatech cards are mandatory for any deployment of VMX-Capture that captures packet data from the wire or replays packet data to the wire.

Compression cards

One or more compression cards are an optional part of any VMX-Capture deployment. They compress data on-the-fly before it is written to disk. This is allows VMX-Capture to deal effectively with higher data volumes than would be possible without compression.

Different financial market protocols have different compression characteristics, and for low volume deployments it is possible to deploy VMX-Capture without a compression card.

Server platform and deployment options

Beeks Analytics is available as an appliance or as a service in the cloud or (at LD4 or NY4 campuses) via a cross-connect.

Beeks Analytics appliances are usually built on Dell PowerEdge servers.

The current generation servers are based on 1U and 2U, single and dual CPU slot chassis.

As part of its open architecture, Beeks Analytics is also available as a software-only option. Clients can provide their own hardware, using specifications provided by Beeks.

Another key element of the open architecture of Beeks Analytics is the scalability of VMX-Capture and VMX-Analysis. These components can both be deployed on the same hardware, or for higher scale deployments, VMX-Capture can run separately from VMX-Analysis. This allows, for example, VMX-Capture to be scaled locally (close to where the data is captured), with just a subset of the statistics being passed to a central VMX-Analysis server for analysis. VMX-Analysis will then only retrieve full packet data from VMX-Capture on request when a particular timeframe is investigated, reducing the amount of hardware that needs to deployed in order to manage high traffic volumes.

Using the open consumption licencing model, Beeks Analytics software is priced per core used by the software, so your organisation only pays for the analytics processing that they need, and Analytics usage can be scaled up (by licensing more cores for VMX-Capture or VMX-Analysis) without needing to fully replace the underlying hardware platform.