Financial data provider Markit has replaced its high-end Sun Microsystems servers with Linux and Intel-based systems.

The company switched to the new HP environment earlier this month, and says performance has increased by between four and 10 times.

Markit collects more than a million items of finance data from 49 different sources every day, which it aggregates and resells to financial services firms across the globe, including hedge funds, insurance companies and the Bank of England.

Increasing system performance was Markit's main motivation for the deal, but the company has found the commodity-based environment is also faster, cheaper and scales more easily.

Chief technology officer Mike Bedford says he first noticed the potential of the systems in the firm's development environment, which led to further tests in a specialised stress testing lab working with integration partner Keltec.

'We discovered that it didn't take much effort to get a good performance of between four and 10 times faster than the Sun environment,' he said.

Markit's customers depend on accuracy and timely delivery of information to inform their decisions and dictate daily trading.

'With this new environment, we will be able to provide data more speedily to our customers,' said Bedford.

Coinciding with the switch to HP ProLiant servers running Linux, Bedford has also migrated data from Oracle 9i to 10g.

The move away from specialised high-end servers to a commodity-based IT environment is also being made at the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

The LSE is halfway through a four-year programme to switch to a platform based on Windows and Intel technology, with the aim of achieving about ?8m in cost savings.

LSE chief information officer David Lester told Computing earlier this year he is on track to migrate the exchange's Sets trading platform by late 2006 (Computing, 24 February).