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!

IBM’s DeveloperWorks site has an up-to-date, concise explainer about the Linux file system up today that’s worth a quick read, for refresher’s sake.

When it comes to file systems, Linux is the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. Linux supports a large number of file systems, from journaling to clustering to cryptographic. Linux is a wonderful platform for using standard and more exotic file systems and also for developing file systems. This article explores the virtual file system (VFS)—sometimes called the virtual filesystem switch—in the Linux kernel and then reviews some of the major structures that tie file systems together.

It covers all the basics (and I mean BASICS; example of a header found within: What is a file system?), and then goes into the technical stuff after that. Like I said, worth a quick read when you get the chance!

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.

IBM DeveloperWorks is running an in-depth look at the inner working of the Linux kernel today, so all you Windows admins who sneak over here to SearchEnterpriseLinux.com on your lunch breaks should go check it out. Virtual file systems, drivers, system call interfaces, and a host of other Linux kernel subsystems are yours for the viewing. And according to the article, Linux currently boasts 6 million lines of code. At which I say, just code? How about six million lines of fun?!

Perhaps the most interesting bit of information over at DeveloperWorks however, are some of the new features now found in the most up to date stable version of the Linux kernel.

Linux, being a production operating system and open source, is a great test bed for new protocols and advancements of those protocols. Linux supports a large number of networking protocols, including the typical TCP/IP, and also extension for high-speed networking (greater than 1 Gigabit Ethernet [GbE] and 10 GbE). Linux also supports protocols such as the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), which provides many advanced features above TCP (as a replacement transport level protocol).

Linux is also a dynamic kernel, supporting the addition and removal of software components on the fly. These are called dynamically loadable kernel modules, and they can be inserted at boot when they’re needed (when a particular device is found requiring the module) or at any time by the user.

A recent advancement of Linux is its use as an operating system for other operating systems (called a hypervisor). Recently, a modification to the kernel was made called the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). This modification enabled a new interface to user space that allows other operating systems to run above the KVM-enabled kernel. In addition to running another instance of Linux, Microsoft Windows can also be virtualized. The only constraint is that the underlying processor must support the new virtualization instructions. See the Resources section for more information.

Flexible. Open. KVM and hypervisors. Sounds pretty good to me.

Take one multi-billion dollar company, add a sprinkling of inquisitive analysts and a smattering of open source software, and you’ll have the annual IBM open source analyst briefing, which happened last week.

Analyst Joe Clabby, who’s spoke with SearchEnterpriseLinux.com in the past about topics like Xen paravirtualization, attended the event and came back armed with 30-odd pages of notes.

The takeaway? That IBM had firmed up its message from one year ago, and was decidedly more serious this time around about filling “gaps” in its support of open source software.

According to Clabby (who was writing for Charles King’s Pund-IT Review), some of last year’s gaps included:

• IBM’s open source business/revenue models were a little “tenuous”;
• The fiercely independent open source community had yet to indicate that it wanted large, commercial vendor involvement in their initiatives;
• There were large infrastructure-related holes that needed to be filled;
• Customer buying preferences were not clearly understood;
• IBM and other commercial vendors needed to prove that they could all play well together in the open source sandbox – especially when it came to building common standards to support open source initiatives

But things have firmed up a bit this year, Clabby said, and had gone from “mushy” to firm with the help of a few panel sessions:

• One of the panels had four business partners willing to speak about IBM’s efforts in open source. On this panel I asked each partner to describe his open source business/revenue model. To my surprise, I found four different models [one software as a service (SAS) approach; one SAS wannabe; one user-based pricing; and one custom-based pricing]. In short, there appear to be about eight or ten valid models for deriving revenue in the open source space – and IBM’s business partners – as well as IBM are using several of them.
• In addition to panel discussions, IBM presented 16 sub-sessions related to open source including open communities; the impact of Web 2.0; application server progress; software delivery models; small/midsized business initiatives; systems/storage management; real-time Linux, grids, and more. Suffice it to say, that IBM is very, very active in many, many aspects and areas of open source computing.
• IBM is placing a lot of emphasis on creating turnkey, replicable, branded system/application/server products to simplify market delivery of its open source solutions

Exciting times at IBM for open source.