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!

My comrade in data center arms Mark Fontecchio is presenting a unique iSeries problem over at our sister blog today.

At the iSeries blog, Mark tells the tale of an iSeries user who would like to run all his Oracle software — databases and the E-Business Suite — on the same hardware and software platform. he would like that hardware platform to be the i5.

But there’s where the trouble begins. Mark explains:

The Oracle certification matrix is a guessing game, according to this person. First off, Oracle doesn’t certify its Database Server or E-Business Suite to run on i5/OS. It does certify both to run on AIX, which can be carved into a partition of its own on the System i, but the database team wants to run Oracle applications on Linux. Why? According to this person, that’s what Oracle recommends and besides, that’s what they’re familiar with anyway.

OK, so run them on Linux on Power, right? Wrong. Oracle has certified Oracle Database Server to run on Linux on Power, but not the E-Business Suite. So now this person isn’t sure what to do. Oracle Database Server will likely get migrated off the System i and onto x86 unless IBM and Oracle can come together and figure out how to certify the E-Business Suite on Linux on Power.

It’s a migration certification quandary, is what it is. Do you have a solution? Do you have the same unsolvable problem? Shoot Mark Fontecchio an email about it, because he’s planning to tackle this issue head on with an upcoming article.

Oracle announced today the general availability of 11g for the Linux platform only. You Windows and Unix guys will just have to wait your turn! Don’t worry though, because if historical trends are any indication, you’ll be rolling in 11g love a mere month or so from now.

Much was said of why Oracle chose to release on Linux first and decline comment on the other OS’s, with most of it focusing on the fact that Linux was “here to stay” or “mission critical” or whatever. That very well may be be the case, but I decided to dig a bit deeper thanks to an inside tip from one of my many infamous blog spies.

After the tip, I called over to Forrester Research analyst Noel Yuhanna, who follows Oracle, to discuss 11g, Linux, and the fact that Windows SQL Server is pretty hot right now. Hot enough for Oracle to take notice anyway, and make a huge push behind Linux. Was it Oracle making bank off of Linux, or Oracle positioning itself against Microsoft? Both?
We agreed that Linux is a huge moneymaker for Oracle, and has been for some time. Another analyst firm, Gartner, compiled some numbers recently that bare this out: Gartner’s recent report showed that Oracle on Linux grew 72% in 2006, which was faster than overall relational database management system market growth and faster than “general RDBMS growth” on Linux (67%).

Wim Coekaerts, Oracle’s vice president of Linux engineering, told me during a call we had set up for LinuxWorld that the growth is expected to continue. More Unbreakable Linux customers were announced at LinuxWorld, including game company Activision, which will “gradually” switch over to Oracle Linux (based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and has purchased support from Oracle. There’s already more than a few dozen customers on record saying they went to Oracle for their Linux support, but Coekaerts said the list has grown much larger than that since Oracle Linux was announced in late 2006. FYI — More on that call and our Oracle 11g on Linux coverage will be live soon on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com.
Michael Dolan, who works for IBM but blogs 100% independently from that company on his blog at MichaelDolan.com, put things into perspective with some thoughts on 11g, Linux and hardware a few weeks back.

Ok, I added the “[Oracle 11g] for Linux” b/c I’m sure they still support all the usual platforms. I actually saw this today and thought… hmmm… what will happen to all those 10g (or pre-10g) Solaris, HPUX and Windows systems when those customers go to upgrade? Solaris and SPARC are on their way out, Windows = Microsoft and Oracle hates that, and HPUX is on a rotting Itanium vine and many users wouldn’t dare go there… I suspect with Oracle going to Linux as its primary OS of choice (RHEL based) we’ll probably see yet another round of thousands of systems moving onto Linux.

Sure it’s skewed because he works for IBM, but does the message bear out where the messenger might be tainted by some bias?

IDC and Forrester don’t track specific numbers,  only market share, so comparisons between the number of Oracle databases on Linux and Windows are hard to come by. However, Yuhanna told me during our call that Windows customers are a “lost cause” to Oracle because by and by they are completely content with SQL Server and would be hard pressed to switch soon, if ever. But Linux is growing by leaps and bounds, and Unix is still there to be cannibalized. Oracle, Yuhanna said, might be using Linux not only as a moneymaker, but as a defense against losing more market share to SQL Server.

Oh, and they might acquire Red Hat. Maybe. Stay tuned to SearchEnterpriseLinux.com and sister site SearchOracle.com for more on this soon.