Red Hat announced that a European branch of the the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has implemented its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Network. NYSE Euronext is using RHEL for key components of its “mission-critical,” high-speed financial trading environments, Red Hat said.

NYSE Eurotext chose Linux due to its greater flexibility, freedom from vendor lock-in, cost savings, and the ability to handle heavy workloads, says Red Hat. The company beat out another Linux vendor for a variety of reasons, it says, including enhanced support and RHEL's implementation of the open-source Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) guidelines.

The Red Hat-based software runs on 200 HP ProLiant DL585 four-processor servers, 400 ProLiant BL 685c blades, and AMD dual-core Opteron processors. NYSE Euronext plans to add several hundred more RHEL subscriptions in the coming 18 months, according to Red Hat.

The customer win appears to be another indication that new real-time technology integrated into major Linux distros is proving up to the task of mission-critical applications. Red Hat, Novell, and MontaVista have all incorporated Ingo Molnar's “RT Preempt” patch into their real-time distro versions, providing guarantees for hard timing deadlines.

A year ago, Red Hat announced it was working on a real-time version of its enterprise Linux distribution targeting financial institutions and electronic trading systems. Additionally, it said it was working on a real-time networking specification aimed at financial services applications with JPMorgan, Cisco, Chase Bank, Envoy, iMatix, IONA, Red Hat, TWIST Process Innovations, and 29West. Greater real-time performance in the kernel can improve the performance of applications that are latency bottlenecked due to kernel scheduling and interrupt handling, and do not need to be recompiled to benefit from the improvements, Red Hat said at the time.

Stated Steve Rubinow, CIO at NYSE Euronext, “The pace of electronic trading has picked up dramatically. Linux as an operating system has been the fastest growing with respect to these requirements. Linux gave us the flexibility that we desired, and we felt that this was right for our environment. Red Hat satisfied our objectives. Red Hat is almost like water, it's pervasive within our architecture. Without it, most of our computers wouldn't be running.”

Red Hat offers a case study on the NYSE Euronext implementation, including a video, here.

 
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