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NY Stock Exchange Moves To Linux

Posted by kdawson on from the bye-bye-big-iron dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Even the old mainframe strongholds, the financial markets, are moving away from big iron. The New York Stock Exchange is one of them, as it's leaving the mainframe for AIX and Linux. They're doing it to save money; it seems that transactions are going to cost half as much on Unix and Linux as they did on the mainframe." The first phase of the transition happened last Monday.

4 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what was it on before? by mchinand · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here are some of IBM's non-Unix mainframe OSs. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/. They could be using some other vendor as well.

  2. NASDAQ by rlp · · Score: 3, Informative

    The NASDAQ also uses Unix. They use fault-tolerant Unix boxes from HP (formerly Tandem).

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  3. actually it's aix by portscan · · Score: 3, Informative

    the trades will be managed by aix and linux will just be used for "ftp transfers on the front end." this would be bulk data transfers, not data feeds and all i/o as other might have suggested. i can pretty much guarantee you that the nyse is not processing trades and sending out live market data (to bloomberg, retuters, etc.) by ftp.

    also, i am somewhat concerned by this move in light of the trading disruption at the end of february where the existing (mainframe, i presume) trading systems could not handle all the trades and the data feeds were way behind the actual prices of the securities. i know the nyse is a public for-profit company now, so it's silly to talk about "public interest" but shouldn't there be some regulation about the capacity of their IT infrastructure to make sure that their cost-cutting doesn't cause another 4% decrease in stock market value on an abnormally high trading day?

  4. They are not "moving to Linux" by parvenu74 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I know that it's optional around here to RTFA, but the original poster is wrong to title this entry as a move to Linux: this is a primarily move from mainframe to AIX on pSeries, with a few other tasks (FTP) being tossed to Linux like you'd throw a dog a bone. Using this lack of logic, it would be plausible to suggest that the NYSE is "moving to Mac OS X" because a few people in the advertising and marketing department use Macs for their jobs. I realize this isn't Rolling Stone magazine, but the lack of journalistic quality control here at /. is pathetic.