Databento, Napatech collaborate on solutions for real-time financial data
Databento, a platform to offer market data on a usage-based pricing model and Napatech, a provider of programmable smart network interface cards (SmartNICs) for data processing unit (DPU) and infrastructure processing unit (IPU) services in telecom, cloud, enterprise, cybersecurity, and financial applications worldwide, have announced that their collaboration on packet capture infrastructure for real-time financial data.
Databento provides institutional-quality market data on a pay-as-you-go basis, and its self-service API and web UI reduce dataset acquisition time from months to minutes. The firm processes billions of market events per day in colocation sites, with direct market access across multiple asset classes. Databento chose Napatech’s SmartNICs for several key benefits – including high-performance data rates, lossless packet capture, and an extensive API.
“Our historical and live offerings have strict requirements on losslessness and timestamping accuracy, and handling such a large volume of data – at up to line rate – is a significant challenge,” says Renan Gemignani, director of engineering at Databento. “After benchmarking multiple solutions, only Napatech’s SmartNICs met our standards.”
Databento tested competing solutions for its options price reporting authority (OPRA) data capture infrastructure before selecting Napatech as its partner. Databento’s capture infrastructure is designed to support traffic at up to a line rate of 100 Gbps with zero packet loss. Unlike alternative solutions, Napatech’s SmartNICs met Databento’s performance objectives at all required packet sizes and data rates. Databento also found the Napatech API to be easier to use and more flexible, accelerating their time to market.
“Napatech’s precision time protocol (PTP) support and nanosecond resolution enable us to accurately timestamp packets on ingress to our servers. This allows Databento to provide the most reliable and accurate data to market participants,” adds Jack Culhane, principal engineer at Databento. “With the Napatech SmartNIC, we can also precisely identify when an event happened and measure our latency within any part of our network.”
“We are delighted that Databento has selected our SmartNICs to address the demanding performance challenges of their packet capture infrastructure,” says Charlie Ashton, senior director of business development at Napatech. “We look forward to ongoing collaboration with Databento to ensure that our products continue to meet their requirements as their solutions and services evolve.”
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