Sun Microsystems today revealed that over 40 new Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) "proof-of-concept" trials with financial services firms from around the world have produced significant performance results on Sun's latest systems. Customers with processor-intensive environments, including Mitsubishi Securities, SunGard, Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX), Kasikorn Bank (Thailand), ABN AMRO (Singapore), D.E. Shaw, JP Morgan Chase (recently announced) as well as the largest securities company in Japan, were among the latest to work with Sun. In all, more than 40 customers contributed to this effort, which delivered performance improvements of up to 400 percent. "Solaris 10 OS for x64 provides the reliability of an enterprise platform at commodity pricing," said Richard Ward, director of technical services, PHLX. "These case studies reaffirm Sun's leadership as a provider of high performance computing solutions for the financial services industry," said Stuart Wells, executive vice president of Strategic Development and Sun Financing, Sun Microsystems. "We believe Sun will continue to see growth in this sector for the remainder of 2005 and beyond." Over the past year Sun has been working with select financial firms to further validate Solaris 10 OS, running Sun's new x64 platform-based Sun Fire servers powered with AMD Opteron and SPARC processors as well as competitive vendors' hardware. Applications that were tested on Sun's platform were some of the most compute-intensive applications that financial firms rely on for day-to-day operations including: -- Grid and Utility Computing (a key aspect of Sun's pay-for-use model) -- Next-generation Trading -- Real Time Data -- Risk Management -- Transaction Authentication -- Compliance -- Financial Services Portals and Exchanges A few customer results are featured below. The trials took place in North America, Europe and Asia. Philadelphia Stock Exchange Moves to Solaris 10, sees 30 percent additional performance The Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX), which completed its proof-of- concept as an early access Solaris 10 OS customer, is scheduled to go live in early July 2005 with its options trading platform running on Solaris 10 OS. The Exchange has seen an improvement of 30% in performance on Solaris 10 OS and leveraged new features such as Solaris Dynamic Tracing (Dtrace), which provides over 30,000 in-kernal probes that deliver real-time analysis of system performance on live production systems. "The Philadelphia Stock Exchange has been so impressed with Solaris 10 on SPARC processors that it has now embarked on a new proof-of-concept trial on the Sun FireV40z server for x64-based systems and Solaris 10," said Richard Ward, director of technical services. Ward added: "We have successfully moved some applications to Solaris 10 for x64 Opteron processor-based servers. We are looking to leverage the rich features and architecture for improved performance and cost reduction simply by recompiling and deploying." SunGard: x64 Servers Achieve 1700 Valuations Per Minute SunGard's Investment Systems Unit recently worked with Sun to test the SunGard XAMIN SOLUTION on Sun's x64 Sun Fire servers running Solaris 10 OS, as part of an ongoing effort to enhance product scalability. XAMIN is SunGard's industry-leading integrated suite of performance measurement and risk management tools, which support the cyclical process of measuring portfolio performance, managing risk, and reporting results. XAMIN is used by some of the world's largest financial services companies. The x64 Sun Fire servers enabled XAMIN to achieve over 1700 valuations per minute and ensures that SunGard can offer XAMIN on a leading cost-effective platform with the same level of Solaris application security, reliability, and scalability that its existing client base has come to expect. "Our work with Sun's Solaris OS has allowed us to demonstrate a level of scalability that is critical to both clients and prospects and has put us an order of magnitude ahead of the game in performance with our XAMIN solution," said Doug Morgan, President of SunGard Investment Systems. Mitsubishi Securities International: Launches Grid on Solaris 10 OS and Sun Fire V20z server; increases performance Based in London, Mitsubishi Securities International is a leading investment bank. This proof-of-concept demonstrated that the Sun Fire V20z servers with the AMD Opteron processor running Solaris 10 OS substantially reduced the time to process trades, while offering additional security and stability compared to other platforms. Sun had worked with Mitsubishi Securities Exotic Derivative Group to complete a proof-of-concept to move a derivative pricing application to a grid infrastructure based on Sun Fire V20z servers running the Solaris 10 OS, as well as Sun N1 Grid Engine software. The derivative pricing application is a critical application for the bank; failure to complete certain pricing calculations would mean missed trading opportunities and lost revenue. Impressed with these results, Mitsubishi Securities has moved to deploy a grid comprised of 49 Sun Fire V20z servers running the Solaris 10 OS and N1 Grid Engine software in the Mitsubishi Securities Exotic Derivative Group. Largest Securities Firm in Japan Says Sun's OS Trumps Red Hat's By Nearly 400 percent In March the largest Japanese securities firm completed a proof-of-concept to evaluate the performance of an in-house developed securities trading application, comparing a Sun Fire V20z server running Solaris 10 OS against a Dell PowerEdge system using Red Hat Linux 7.3. The testing showed that the Sun Fire V20z server ran up to 378% faster than the Dell PE2850. In addition, the Red Hat environment was found to be difficult to maintain. 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