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!

Sun Microsystems Inc. just did a smart about-face.
According to well-known open source analyst and blogger Bill Weinberg, a few years ago Sun quit the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) Carrier- Grade Linux working group when OSDL declined to grant Solaris equal status with Linux for Carrier-Grade networking applications. (For those of you who don’t eat and sleep networking trivia, Carrier Grade is a networking classification that signifies high availability and fast recovery.)

Well, it seems that the passage of time and the knock of opportunity have overcome any hard feelings, judging from Sun’s deal with Wind River Systems Inc., which was announced recently at the MySQL trade show.

Here’s the deal: Wind River, whose technology helps embedded devices run faster, has agreed to port its Carrier Grade systems to Sun’s latest and greatest UltraSparc T2 chip multithreading (CMT) processor, which runs much faster than a conventional single-core processor.

The deal is good for Sun, giving it an entrée into embedded networking applications, and good for the networking industry, which would benefit from Sun’s newest and most powerful CMT processors. This could in turn benefit data center managers who already use Sparc processors and are thinking about beefing up their telecom networks, Weinberg said.

Whether they’ll think to ask for Sun processors is anyone’s guess, Weinberg cautioned, since the processor brand isn’t highlighted in the hardware packages.”This is a bet on both sides,” Weinberg said. “It’s not a sure thing.”

But forgiveness is good medicine for the soul — and for business too. Sounds like a good move.

Usually, very practical factors determine product choices for IT managers. When it comes to Linux and open source products, however, emotions — particularly conscience and loyalty — battle with reason.

While writing about Jim Klein’s decision to stop using Novell NetWare and SUSE, I searched for other stories on similar subjects. I came across Don McAskill’s thoughtful post on “The Enterprise Linux problem” on his SmugBlog.

In this post, Askill — CEO of an online photo-sharing company called SmugMug – describes his company’s experiences with several operating systems, ranging from SUSE to Red Hat to Solaris. He also laments the dilemma of a lot of people who want their purchases to reflect their beliefs: When push comes to shove, can you afford to pay a higher price for a product — in this case, Red Hat Linux — because its maker follows principles you believe in?

I really enjoyed reading this blog and the comments.