Meff, the Spanish financial futures exchange, has begun moving its electronic trading system to a new technology platform supplied by Sun Microsystems.
The exchange's old servers will gradually be replaced by 200 Sun Fire V60x and seven Sun Fire V210 servers running the Solaris operating system on x86 technology over a two-month period to avoid service cuts.
The new platform connects the 100 Meff members with the exchange's data processing centres in Madrid and Barcelona.
Sun says the move to the new technology will mean that the Meff platform will be able to handle up to 800 messages per second, considerably more than the 250 supported by the previous Compaq-based platform.
Commenting on the switch to Sun technology, Andres Rodriguez, data processing manager, Meff, says: "Before deciding we ran several performance trials and finally chose Solaris on Sun x86 servers as they provided the best option in price competitiveness, speed, security and reliability."
The new platform is capable of handling 2.3 million outgoing and 658,000 incoming messages per day on the central host, says Sun, with a mean response time of 0.10 seconds from the moment the order is entered at the terminal until it is confirmed.