Red Hat announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, in combination with Reuters Market Data System (RMDS 6.0), IBM BladeCenter H and 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology from Blade Network Technologies and Chelsio Communications, delivers record-breaking performance results that meet key demands of the financial services industry. Together, the combination provides both the lowest mean latency and lowest standard deviation of latency reported with RMDS.

The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC), a provider of performance measurement services, tools and research to the securities industry, reported the record-breaking performance results (see www.STACresearch.com/redhat). The test used Reuters standard test procedures.

Jack Gidding, associate director of STAC, noted, “This infrastructure stack enabled the low-latency configuration of RMDS to keep mean latency below 0.9 milliseconds at up to 600,000 updates per second. In addition, standard deviation of latency - a measure of jitter - was also the lowest we've seen with RMDS: less than 0.5 milliseconds at rates up to 600,000 updates per second. Finally, a single server with a stacked RMDS topology was able to output a very high 5.8 million updates per second in the most extreme fanout test.”

Red Hat continues to work with data platform providers like Reuters to tune and optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux to achieve superior performance for demanding workloads in the financial services industry, said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. As data traffic continues to grow in the financial services industry, there is a continued need to deliver higher throughput and lower latency.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on IBM BladeCenter servers provides exceptional performance for financial services,” said Alex Yost, vice president, IBM BladeCenter. “This analysis from STAC shows that our combined technologies, together with Chelsio and BNT, enable customers to achieve the lowest mean latency ever reported with Reuters Market Data System.”