New benchmark performance results for Thomson Reuters market data platform have been announced by Sun Microsystems, Inc. The new benchmark demonstrates that running the platform, known as Reuters Market Data System 6.0.3 (RMDS), on Sun technology not only provides the best throughput performance to date by breaking the million-messages-per second barrier, but also the lowest available network latency on a 1Gb Ethernet.

With firms needing to re-architect their trading systems for low latency and high performance, algorithmic trading continues to drive the quest for greater speed and lower latency in the capital markets sector. As financial organizations strive to keep pace with new technology and remain competitive in the face of increasing competition, this need is even more critical today.

CTO, Financial Services Group, Sun Microsystems, Ambreesh Khanna, declared: “Financial institutions are now building or looking to build optimum infrastructures to support this step-change in performance and take advantage of the computing power that is now available, whilst still reducing power requirements and total cost of ownership.” He added: “Through partnerships with the world's leading application vendors and innovators like Intel and Thomson Reuters, Sun enables firms to achieve low-latency, high-availability trading.”

At higher throughput rates, scalable performance is especially important, since a significant reduction in end-to-end trade latency gives capital markets firms a critical trade timing advantage in the face of increasing market data and trading volumes – without necessitating big-budget infrastructure replacement work. Experience has shown that only the Solaris™ Operating System can continue to deliver deterministic latency performance at very high message throughput rates.