Pure Storage Recently Announced Breakthrough STAC-M3 Benchmark Testing Results for High-frequency and Quantitative Trading

Pure Storage® (NYSE: PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers the world’s most advanced data storage technology and services, announced breakthrough STAC-M3 benchmark testing results for its FlashBlade//S™ systems, specifically the FlashBlade//S500 series, to demonstrate its performance and scalability capabilities which are required by the financial sector.

Industry significance:

In the fast-paced world of high-frequency and quantitative trading, every microsecond counts. Financial firms are constantly on the lookout for data platforms that offer better performance, scalability, and reliability for their quant analysts, data scientists, risk managers, and others supporting their trading teams.

STAC® (Strategic Technology Analysis Center) improves technology discovery and assessment in the finance industry through dialog and research. The STAC Benchmark™ Council, comprising 485 leading financial firms and 60 technology vendors produces benchmark standards that lead to high-value technology research and testing software for the financial sector. The STAC-M3 Benchmark suite is an industry standard for tick-analytics benchmarks, specifically designed for database software/hardware stacks managing large time series of market data.

Benchmark Testing Overview:

STAC recently conducted baseline and scaling STAC-M3 Benchmarks on a comprehensive stack that involved Pure Storage’s FlashBlade//S500. The stack featured KX’s kdb+ 4.0 DBMS, utilising NFS version 3 to access an impressive 266TiB of total usable data across a single FlashBlade//S500 chassis (10x FlashBlades with two 24TB flash modules per blade). The kdb+ software was distributed across eight Dell PowerEdge R740xd servers, each equipped with two Intel Xeon Platinum 8260 CPUs and 256GiB of memory.

This is the first solution Pure Storage has submitted for a STAC-M3 audit. Many participants tune their infrastructure stack and operating system extensively to get the best benchmarks possible. In contrast, Pure Storage chose to have the benchmark harness run with a baseline FlashBlade//S500 system, a common server and network architecture, and minimal configuration tuning to demonstrate that our customers can achieve maximum performance and simplicity when choosing Pure Storage as their time-series or tick-by-tick market data platform.

STAC-M3 Results:

Faster Performance

Pure Storage’s solution involving kdb+ 4.0, Compatibility Rev I of the kdb+ STAC Pack, and eight database servers accessing a Pure Storage FlashBlade//S500 system via NFSv3 showcased remarkable speed gains versus a solution involving the same number of database servers, three network attached flash storage nodes, and Compatibility Rev H of the STAC Pack:

• 13 of 17 STAC-M3 Antuco mean-response time benchmarks witnessed improvements, including a 7x speedup in the 10-user theoretical P&L (STAC-M3.β1.10T.THEOPL.TIME).
• 17 of 24 STAC-M3 Kanaga mean-response time benchmarks exhibited enhancements, such as a 1.3x-1.5x speedup in 50-user 12-day VWAB (STAC-M3.β1.50T.YR{1,2,3,4,5}VWAB-12D-HO.TIME).

Additionally, when compared to a cloud-based solution, the FlashBlade//S500 series outperformed in 9 of 17 Antuco benchmarks and 12 of 24 Kanaga benchmarks, showcasing significant speed advantages.

Scalability

These results validate the FlashBlade//S500 series’ performance for financial sector tick data and time series-driven workloads. The platform enables firms to run complex queries across data sets of any scale with maximum throughput and minimum latency.

As workloads increased in volume and thread count, the FlashBlade//S500 series demonstrated the ability to handle highly parallel workloads efficiently. The architecture allowed for seamless scalability, crucial for the demanding requirements of quant and high-frequency trading.

STAC-M3 Antuco results were obtained with the entire data set centralised in a single directory, showcasing the efficiency that firms can gain by eliminating the necessity to distribute data across multiple, specific directories for optimal performance. This approach underscores the streamlined and effective data management facilitated by Pure Storage’s solution.

Executive Insight:

“We are pleased to welcome Pure Storage to the ranks of technology providers who submit solutions for independent testing against the customer-developed STAC Benchmark standards. Financial firms on the STAC Benchmark Council designed STAC-M3 to test a representative range of business use cases, and the need for fast and efficient time-series analysis has never been higher.” – Jack Gidding, CEO of STAC

“STAC’s benchmark tests are highly regarded in the financial world and we are delighted that our FlashBlade//S500 series stood out as highly reliable and performant against other vendor’s offerings and against cloud-based solutions. This is a great testament to Pure Storage’s commitment to delivering best-in-class solutions for the financial sector.” – Nathan Hall, Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan, Pure Storage