Financial giant Credit Suisse First Boston has increased system performance twenty-fold by moving its mission critical application infrastructure from Risc-Unix to a Lintel environment.

While incumbents continue to dismiss Linux as unfit for serious enterprise applications, the bank has proved the opposite by trusting its global trading system, Agora, to the operating system.

Credit Suisse migrated its complex trading architecture from 20 Risc-based machines running an undisclosed flavour of Unix to a few Intel-based machines running Red Hat Linux on an Egenera BladeFrame.

The system handles some 35 million global and 25 million US transactions per day. The combination of Red Hat Linux with the BladeFrame consolidated servers, cut down costs, and improved performance by twenty-fold compared to the legacy Unix system.

"Our systems need to be agile," said Steve Yatco, director and CTO at Credit Suisse. "Since implementing Linux we have noticed significant performance enhancements."

Michael Tieman, CTO of Red Hat, pointed out that Agora had been developed and tuned on a proprietary Unix platform. He said he expected some improvement, but was "amazed" by the results of the "decidedly enterprise application".

Not all industry observers were surprised. Eddie Bleasdale, director of consultants firm Netproject argued that part of the performance increase was due to replacing old hardware for new, but added there was "no reason why Linux could not outperform Unix.

"Linux is brilliant on clusters, multi processor environments, and IBM mainframes," he said. "Mass produced technology will replace all proprietary technology including Risc - there is no way Risc can compete," he added.

"Enterprises still believe that if they spend more money, they get a better system. But many IT failures happened because people had too much money to spend on proprietary technology."

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