Financial firms are expressing increasing interest in Apple’s Mac OS X and Xserve server hardware.
Kx Systems, leader in high-performance analytics on streaming and historical data, has announced kdb+ database and application support for the Mac OS X operating system. Kx
added Mac support because of increasing requests from kdb+ developers, who work in the leading global financial firms that comprise the Kx user base.
“As Apple continues to offer larger, faster servers built on Intel processors, the Macintosh is becoming an attractive alternative for financial institutions,” said Simon Garland, Kx CTO. “IT departments are looking for maintainable performance, and Macintosh servers are simple to administer. Kdb+ doesn’t need a raft of clusters and grids in order to deliver millisecond query response times. New customers are often surprised by how much they can accomplish using our software with a single processor.”
Kx expects the Macintosh option for kdb+ to appeal to leading financial firms not only for corporate servers but also because the Mac’s stable and easy-to-use development platform appeals to developers in the office and at home. “Many of our customers are trading globally 24×7, which means that growing numbers of developers using notebooks are going online to monitor applications and finish development from home or on the road. The Mac notebooks are ideal for that,” commented Garland.
The port to Max OS X was straightforward, largely because Kx architected its kdb+ database and applications for easy portability to support new operating system versions quickly. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of kdb+ on Mac OS X are available now. In addition to Mac OS X, kdb+ supports Linux (any version), Windows, and Solaris.
Kx Systems offers a unified approach to streaming, realtime and historical data with its kdb+ platform. Kdb+ combines a streaming event processor, a 64-bit in-memory and on-disk database, and an expressive development and analytics environment. Providing an end-to-end architecture for streaming, real-time and historical data enables kdb+ to deliver ultimate performance for high-volume, data-intensive analytics and applications.
Kx Systems: http://www.kx.com
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “David O.” for the heads up.]
This can’t be right, shouldn’t they be waiting for Leopard?
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That’s a company that stays crispier in milk much longer than those flat, flaky developers.
TMF
isn’t that Special Kx?
No, that’s Cayman Airways.
No need to wait for Leopard. OS X Server is more than capable of doing serious database work. We have one of the few XServe/XRaid boxes (dual G4) in our agency, and it’s done yeoman service in our computer room where it serves up 2-3 TB of data to our Sun boxes using NFS. And we barely scratched the surface of its capabilities.
So yes, Apple has a growing presence not only among consumers and small businesses, but an as yet unrecognized one in the back rooms.. If Parallels or VMWare can run under Server there’s no reason we couldn’t run virtual servers on the newer XServes.
MW: pressure… Are Apple’s competitors feeling it yet?
I will switch banks in a New York minute to a (US) bank that switches their servers to OS X. It makes me MAD to see banks running their web databases on Windows. I don’t fault the ones that run *NIX, but I will support one that makes the big switch.