Databento and Napatech announce collaboration on packet capture solutions for real-time financial data

SALT LAKE CITY, USA and COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Jan 10, 2023 - Databento, the world’s first platform to offer market data on a usage-based pricing model, and Napatech™(OSLO: NAPA.OL) - the leading 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 – announced today 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.

‍“Handling such a large volume of data – at up to line rate – is a significant challenge,” said Renan Gemignani, Director of Engineering at Databento. “We have adopted Napatech’s SmartNICs across our internal 25G and 100G capture infrastructure. Our historical and live data offerings rely on the capture of every single packet, and they ensure zero packet loss across our network – even for the smallest packets that require the most processing.”

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," added Jack Culhane, Principal Engineer at Databento. "With the Napatech SmartNIC, we can 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,” said 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.”

Databento makes it simpler and faster to access institutional-grade financial data. Founded by traders and engineers from among the world’s leading quantitative hedge funds, Databento’s self-service model allows users to instantly pick up live exchange feeds and terabytes of historical data — and only pay for what they use. Databento’s servers are hosted in the colocation facilities of various trading venues for low-latency and high-fidelity data capture, direct from the source.

To learn more about Databento, visit www.databento.com. .

Napatech is the leading supplier of programmable FPGA-based SmartNIC solutions used in telecom, cloud, enterprise, cybersecurity and financial applications worldwide. Through commercial-grade software suites integrated with robust, high-performance hardware, Napatech accelerates telecom, networking and security workloads to deliver best-in-class system-level performance while maximizing the availability of server compute resources for running applications and services.

Additional information is available at www.napatech.com .