The measurements, achieved using the IBM BladeCenter HS22 server, enable financial services firms to process 1.3 million market data updates per second, while maintaining a latency of less than 1 millisecond, allowing faster decision making with an infrastructure that can respond quickly to changing market conditions and events in real time.

Making faster, and cost-effective, trading decisions is even more important in today's highly competitive business environment for financial markets clients. As market data changes and world events occur - whether due to the latest economic forecasts, merger and acquisitions, or late-breaking news from around the world - new intelligence and insights for smarter financial services is enabled by accelerating the ability to process huge amounts of data.

"The new generation System x and BladeCenter solutions redefine how x86 clients can address today's challenges with servers that have less than half the power consumption, one-third the management cost, and more than twice the performance," said Alex Yost, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group. "This industry-leading performance is exactly what our financial markets clients need to help them improve service, reduce cost and manage risk to create a more dynamic infrastructure."

The benchmarks were completed through collaboration between Thomson Reuters, Intel and IBM and break previous performance records by achieving a throughput of 4.02 million updates per second on the Point-to-Point Server (P2PS) RMDS v6.3 infrastructure component producer 50/50 fan-out test1.

"The performance of the Intel Xeon 5500 processor series dramatically improves the throughput of this benchmark beyond previously tested platforms," said Garry Thall, district manager, Intel Americas, Financial Services.