Credit Suisse First Boston is claiming significant performance improvements across its Agora order matching system following a successful conversion from Unix RISC-based machines to Linux.
The CSFB Agora application handles basket trading, time slicing and institutional order flow globally. Agora's enterprise notification system processes roughly 35 million global and 25 million US transactions each day. CSFB converted from a four-way RISC-based architecture to a two-way Intel architecture based on Egenera BladeFrame servers running Red Hat on an Intel chip.
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."
As a result of the implementation, CSFB will consolidate more than 20 Risc-based machines to only a few Intel processors, capable of running up to a half-billion transactions each day per Egenera Processing Blade. CSFB is claiming a 20x increase in overall performance, in contrast to traditional legacy Unix systems.