GigaSpaces XAP provides Sun's Market Data customers the ability to handle and enrich raw data - coming from one or more data sources including direct exchange feeds - quickly with high throughput, and availability. With the addition of the GigaSpaces Enterprise Data Grid, end users can now choose various schemes of in-memory data for extreme low-latency access.

"Many of our customers in the Securities industry are facing performance and scalability challenges with their data-intensive trading applications", stated Ambreesh Khanna, Sun Microsystems' CTO for financial services. "Leveraging GigaSpaces' ability to process large amounts of data from multiple sources on the Grid in real time, with the high performance and low power consumption of our Sun Fire servers, Sun's Market Data solution is delivering on the primary needs of Wall Street's largest, most demanding firms."

GigaSpaces and Sun engineers recently completed joint scalability and tuning studies of GigaSpaces XAP middleware on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), Java Platform Standard Edition 5 and Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers. The results showed the highly parallel processing architectures of GigaSpaces XAP and the Solaris 10 OS on UltraSPARC T1-based servers to be highly complementary and together form a superior, linearly scalable platform for running low latency, data-intensive, multi-threaded applications in financial services organisations.

According to Amnon Raviv, senior director of Strategic Alliances at GigaSpaces, "We optimized GigaSpaces XAP on Sun's T1000 and T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 OS, enabling customers to get extreme scalability and performance. We expect customers will see similar results with XAP on Solaris 10 and Sun's x64 (x86, 64-bit) systems. By choosing XAP and the Solaris 10 OS, customers get the most bang for their buck - super-fast performance, and ability to scale across a wide range of hardware."