Sun says that customers with processor-intensive environments, including Mitsubishi Securities, SunGard, Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX), Kasikorn Bank (Thailand), ABN AMRO (Singapore), and D.E. Shaw, have been putting the new OS through its paces. The vendor says that in all, the new system delivered performance improvements of up to 400 percent.

Richard Ward, director of technical services, PHLX, says the options mart has witnessed performance improvements of 30% during testing of the new software. "Solaris 10 OS for x64 provides the reliability of an enterprise platform at commodity pricing," he says.

PHLX is scheduled to go live in early July 2005 with its options trading platform running on Solaris 10 OS. Adds Ward: "The Philadelphia Stock Exchange has been so impressed with Solaris 10 on SPARC processors that it has now embarked on a new proof-of-concept trial on the Sun FireV40z server for x64-based systems and Solaris 10."

At Mitsubishi Securities in London, Sun has completed a proof-of-concept to move a derivative pricing application to a grid infrastructure based on Sun Fire V20z servers running the Solaris 10 OS, as well as Sun N1 Grid Engine software. The vendor says the bank was sufficiently impressed to move to a live deployment comprised of 49 Sun Fire V20z servers.

Sun also claims tests comparing a Sun Fire V20z server running Solaris 10 OS against a Dell PowerEdge system using Red Hat Linux 7.3 showed a 378% performance gain on the Sun kit at an un-named Japanese securities house.

The proof-of-concepts tests have been part of a major push by Sun to claw back some its dealing room market share losses to commodity boxes. The company's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz is set to ram home the message at an address to SIA conference goers at lunch-time today.

Separately, Canadian risk management outfit Algorithmics has said that its next software release, Algo Suite 4.6, will support Solaris 10 on Sparc-based Sun systems.