RALEIGH, N.C–April 8, 2002–Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT) today
announced that a mission critical component of the Credit Suisse
First Boston (CSFB) worldwide financial trading architecture has
been successfully migrated from Unix to Red Hat Linux. CSFB is a
leading global investment bank serving institutional, corporate,
government and individual clients. Its application, called Agora
(Greek for marketplace), performs complex financial transactions
such as basket trading, time slicing, and institutional order flow.
It is able to drive thousands of orders, in a matter of seconds, to
locations around the globe, including the U.K., Japan, Hong Kong
and Korea.
“In an environment of increasing trading volumes and surges in
demand, our systems need to be agile. We can gain a competitive
advantage with a system that is flexible enough to constantly adapt
to new business requirements while always improving prices for our
customers,” said Steve Yatko, director and CTO of Securities IT at
CSFB. “Since implementing Red Hat Linux on the Egenera BladeFrame,
we’ve noticed significant performance enhancements. Agora has
evolved to the point where we are executing record trading
volumes.”
Agora’s enterprise notification system, powered by Red Hat
Linux, processes roughly 35 million global and 25 million U.S.
transactions each day. CSFB converted from a four-way RISC-based
architecture to a two-way Intel architecture running Red Hat on an
Intel chip. With Egenera as the platform provider, Agora’s
structure is made up of high-powered Egenera BladeFrame systems
running Red Hat Linux. The combination of Red Hat Linux with the
BladeFrame consolidates servers and improves performance while
lowering cost for business-critical applications.
As a result of its Red Hat implementation, CSFB will consolidate
more than 20 RISC-based machines to only a few Intel processors,
which can process up to a half-billion transactions each day per
Egenera Processing Blade. CSFB has also noticed a 20x increase in
overall performance, in contrast to traditional legacy UNIX
systems.
“The results CSFB has achieved with Red Hat Linux show the power
not only of our technology, or their knowledge of their own
application, but the strength of the relationship and the results
of working together as partners,” said Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red
Hat. “Even when an application is developed and tuned on a
proprietary Unix platform, I fully expect to see superior
performance when the application is migrated to Red Hat Linux on
Intel processors. But I must honestly say that I am amazed to see
how significantly the results favor the Red Hat Linux platform for
this decidedly enterprise application. My hat is off to the
engineers from both companies for achieving this outstanding
result.”