You have to run pretty fast to keep up with Red Hat these days.

The leading open source vendor just broke two speed records for the financial industry. First, it broke the gold standard for real-time status by processing updates in less than one millisecond, completing a single transaction in .9 of a millisecond. Typically, the fastest processing rates are 10 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds per transaction.

Second, Red Hat had the lowest standard deviation ever recorded or less than .5 milliseconds, which in layman’s terms translates into greater consistency. And third, a single server with a stacked Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) completed a very high ‑- but not record-breaking ­­­­­- volume of transactions, 5.8 million updates per second.

The Securities Technology Analysis Center, which provides performance measurement services to the financial service industry, performed the tests, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, the latest version, with RDMS 6.0 on IBM BladeCenter H and 10 gigabit Ethernet.

“In financial services, speed is the difference between making money and losing money,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat’s platform business unit. “The result is clear: more data, faster data, means better trades and better decisions.”

As if that weren’t enough, Crenshaw struck a blow to proprietary software. “We were 2.4 times faster than Sun Microsystems,” he crowed, comparing Red Hat’s 5.8 million updates with Sun Solaris’ record of 2.4 million updates.

Go, open source! Guess you should have been here for the Boston Marathon!

Working with vendors is tough. You need their help, they want your money. Hopefully, whatever it is they help you install works and the price meets you both somewhere in the middle (as in your side of the middle, right?).

Sometimes this process is a headache, but sometimes a project can really surprise you—things just work and upper management is just peachy keen with how the whole thing looks on the balance sheet.

In that vein, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com wants to help its readers discover the best of the best in Linux products for the enterprise in our prestigious SearchEnterpriseLinux.com 2007 Products of the Year awards. We’ve been asking readers and vendors over at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com to nominate a favorite product they’ve used or to nominate their own new product, and now we’ve opened it up to the Intertubes here at the Enterprise Linux Log. Regardless of where you fall — vendor, user or general Linux guru –the deadline is drawing near!

Our editorial team and a select panel of industry experts and analysts are currently accepting submissions online until 5 p.m. PST on Nov. 9, 2007 in a range of categories, including: Server Linux platform product (either a distribution release or a new, integrated server Linux offering); Security applications/tools for Linux on the server; Virtualization product for Linux on the server; and Linux administration tools. You can access the 2007 POY submission page in the link above.

To qualify, new or significantly upgraded products must have been shipped after October 31, 2006, and before November 1, 2007. Submit your entry today and let us know what you think are the top data center products on the market!

Blade servers and Linux go together like Slashdot and any story about Linus Torvalds, so I’d like to link to a cutesy little diatribe about blades over at our sister blog Server Specs.

Apparently, Hewlett-Packard has introduced “Shorty,” a “smaller blade chassis looking to capture the attention of smaller companies in a similar way that the BladeCenter S aims to. It’s 10.5 inches high, fits eight blades and can plug into a standard 110-volt wall outlet. All in all, it’s a pretty good mini-BladeSystem. Called the c3000, the chassis has its own MySpace page.” That quote courtesy of colleague Mark Fontecchio, News Writer and current North American vagabond (inside joke alert).

Done snickering? Because it’s totally true and it begs the question: Does Tux have a MySpace page yet, or is he totally into Facebook? These are the things I need to know.