Alpha wanted to inject greater performance into its system to support rising trade volumes, a growing marketplace and continuing demand for faster market data delivery and trade execution.

In collaboration with HP, Alpha has implemented a new converged infrastructure with industry-leading HP ProLiant servers to power its unique trading platform. By significantly increasing performance over the previous infrastructure, the HP solution has enabled Alpha to cut order-entry latency to sub-millisecond levels and execute trading orders within an average of 750 microseconds, thereby increasing trading efficiency.

"With our HP Converged Infrastructure, we've achieved the fastest native execution speeds in Canada for our trading platform and are closing the gap on execution speeds in markets around the world," said Karl Ottywill, chief information officer, Alpha. "This not only puts our trading capabilities at the forefront of the Canadian marketplace, but enables us to aggressively compete at a global level."

The new technology, composed of HP ProLiant DL 380 G7 servers, delivers higher performance, and a 35 percent energy reduction. An essential building block for a Converged Infrastructure, HP ProLiant servers provide advanced management and energy efficiency, delivering up to 27 times performance per watt improvements.(1) HP ProLiant G7 servers significantly improve system operations and efficiency throughout the server life cycle, and can pay for themselves in as little as two months.

Alpha's new infrastructure enables the organization to accommodate growth in the Canadian securities market and differentiate itself from the competition.

"With trading transactions increasing and users looking to capitalize on split-second nuances in the market, the ability to process more trading capacity quickly equals competitive advantage," said Dave Frederickson, vice president, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP Canada. "HP technology and industry expertise helped Alpha to develop a scalable, high-performance infrastructure to deliver ultra-fast trading capabilities and rapidly respond to changing market demands."