INDUSTRY

RALEIGH, NC -- Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT), one of the world's premier open source and Linux provider, today announced that a mission critical component of the Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) worldwide financial trading architecture has been successfully migrated from Unix to Red Hat Linux. CSFB is a leading global investment bank serving institutional, corporate, government and individual clients. Its application, called Agora (Greek for marketplace), performs complex financial transactions such as basket trading, time slicing and institutional order flow. It is able to drive thousands of orders, in a matter of seconds, to locations around the globe, including the U.K., Japan, Hong Kong and Korea. "In an environment of increasing trading volumes and surges in demand, our systems need to be agile. We can gain a competitive advantage with a system that is flexible enough to constantly adapt to new business requirements while always improving prices for our customers," said Steve Yatko, director and CTO of Securities IT at CSFB. "Since implementing Red Hat Linux on the Egenera BladeFrame, we've noticed significant performance enhancements. Agora has evolved to the point where we are executing record trading volumes." Agora's enterprise notification system, powered by Red Hat Linux, processes roughly 35 million global and 25 million U.S. transactions each day. CSFB converted from a four-way RISC-based architecture to a two-way Intel architecture running Red Hat on an Intel chip. With Egenera as the platform provider, Agora's structure is made up of high-powered Egenera BladeFrame systems running Red Hat Linux. The combination of Red Hat Linux with the BladeFrame consolidates servers and improves performance while lowering cost for business-critical applications. As a result of its Red Hat implementation, CSFB will consolidate more than 20 RISC-based machines to only a few Intel processors, which can process up to a half-billion transactions each day per Egenera Processing Blade. CSFB has also noticed a 20x increase in overall performance, in contrast to traditional legacy UNIX systems. "The results CSFB has achieved with Red Hat Linux show the power not only of our technology, or their knowledge of their own application, but the strength of the relationship and the results of working together as partners," said Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat. "Even when an application is developed and tuned on a proprietary Unix platform, I fully expect to see superior performance when the application is migrated to Red Hat Linux on Intel processors. But I must honestly say that I am amazed to see how significantly the results favor the Red Hat Linux platform for this decidedly enterprise application. My hat is off to the engineers from both companies for achieving this outstanding result."