White Paper: SQL Server 2008 R2 Provides Enterprise-Class Performance and Scalability for SunGard Front Arena

Today's investors demand a wider variety of asset classes, more complex financial instruments, and a broader geographical range of products than ever before. SunGard meets these demands with Front Arena, an integrated cross-asset platform for sales, trading and risk management, operations, and distribution. Front Arena was designed to handle very large data flows; in high-volume environments such as equities exchange trading, Front Arena customers routinely enter as many as 130,000 trades per day.

Such high-volume workloads and aggressive scalability requirements necessitate an enterprise-class database platform. SunGard Front Arena running on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise can support a large number of concurrent users with fast, nonstop performance on a cost-effective, standards-based server platform. The solid reliability, superior performance, and low total cost of ownership (TCO) of SQL Server—combined with the processing and intelligent workflow capabilities of Front Arena—help firms provide greater control over their entire capital markets trading process.

Engineers from SunGard and Microsoft worked together to confirm the performance and scalability of Front Arena on SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise. The team designed a benchmark test that simulated a real-world, enterprise-class financial workload. Two test scenarios were used in the benchmarking test: exchange trade performance and position control performance.

The results of the benchmark testing  demonstrate that SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise provides an excellent database platform for Front Arena. After optimization, the exchange trade performance scenario resulted in more than 160,000 message inserts per second, and the position control performance test resulted in more than 1,000 trade inserts per second.

The high levels of performance and scalability, coupled with the ability to run on industry-standard servers, confirms that SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise is the right database platform for Front Arena customers who want performance, scalability, and value. For more details read the white paper.