As the global financial markets continue to shift towards electronic trading, the speed at which trading is able to take place establishes the winners and the losers among participants in the trading chain. Latency, wherever and however it is introduced, is the enemy of speed. Market participants are continuously driving to reduce latency in order to stay at the top of the competitive trading landscape. And in order to trade profitably the top is the only place to be. At the same time, developments such as algorithmic trading and market fragmentation have caused transaction and market data rates to skyrocket. For example, message rates across North American exchanges now routinely exceed a million messages per second at market openings.