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NY Stock Exchange Moves To Linux
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.
In Soviet Russia, Linux-running, chair throwing, Beowulf clusters of shark overlords with laserbeams on their heads welcome you, you insensitive clods!
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Wait, what are we talking about again?
I hate printers.
Anyone reminded of that ad about the guys printing the newspaper that says they use Windows because its more reliable and stuff? That wasn't for the NYSE was it? I see that ad all the time on Slashdot and roll my eyes every time :-p
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
The bulk of the savings seem to be coming from reduced hardware and maintenance costs by getting rid of the mainframe and the savings are the reason they are doing it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
What about stability issues? I'd think that these machines would have to be a little bit more robust than linux is capable of being at the moment.
Nothing to do with MS in this.
MS will be affected only when the wall street firms stop using MS Excel, and that may not happen in my lifetime unfortunately.
Thats one small step for penguins, one giant leap for penguin kind. Now I can invest in Linux companies while I am doing it on a Linux machine and the transaction being processed by Linux :)
This Will Not Bode Well For Microsoft
Why? As far as Microsoft is concerned this is either a non-event (they weren't using microsoft before, they aren't now), or a slight move towards using Microsoft (going from a Mainframe to PCs moves them closer to the potential to use Microsoft software).
AccountKiller
ctrl-f tells me they didnt mention microsoft or windows. if it wasnt on *nix before, what was it on?
In my brief experience with an IBM AS/400 (before it was renamed), it seemed like my old company was paying as much annual licensing and support fees as the system originally cost. The software we ran got more expensive as the system went faster. I never quite understand that pricing scheme, since the software didn't actually do anything NEW.
Good move for the NYSE.
Bearded Dragon
In case anyone needs to look it up, Linux is in Eastern Europe between Serbia and Romania.
Happy to help.
I think this is only the beginning of large migrations. To have both 3270 and Linux skills (along w/ DB2) right now would be a killer skills combo.
Well, the migration strategy seems interesting, although not especially surprising; they've eschewed emulation strategies that might incur a performance penalty in favor of some company that actually recompiles the old COBOL and IBM JCL code for modern architectures and does a lot of in-house QA (and, one assumes, has really good support...). They're using smaller IBM AIX servers to actually run the code in the new system, with the HP Linux machines basically doing all the I/O and general feeding of data.
I'm a little surprised that IBM didn't manage to sell them on a new mainframe, or at least on its own clustered solution; or that they didn't ditch IBM completely and go with somebody else (what I'd suspect if somehow someone at IBM had really stepped on the wrong foot).
There's not a whole lot of information in TFA about their old system, which actually sounds like it must be fairly neat; it's only described as a "1,600 MIPS mainframe" and then from context it's clear that it's an IBM of some sort. Another surprising thing is that they complain that the software licenses for it, among other things, are prohibitively expensive -- you'd think that IBM, in danger of losing a mainframe customer completely to commodity kit, would cut them some sort of a cheap-or-free deal on the software just to keep them around and on the support contracts. (I really gotta wonder if someone really boned this up; I mean, if you can't keep a mainframe contract at a place like the NYSE, really, what are you doing?)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Okay ... so when someone buys one, register an 'option purchase' plus a 'bond purchase' by going under this menu ... then use this 'merge' feature ..."
... so when someone buys one, register an 'option purchase' plus a 'bond purchase' by piping these commands together on the command line... then use this 'merge' feature ..."
should be
"Okay
OK, yeah, that's a decade ago, but it still seemed funny to me.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Microsoft says New York Stock Exchange infringes on Microsoft's patent "Letter C in System". Microsoft broad patent invoking the use of the letter C on a file system has some industry experts worried. "We were completely unaware that Microsoft had the rights to the letter c on any operating system. This is going to cost us enormously. We thought we would save twice as much money, but with this frivolous lawsuit pending, we stand to lose four times as much" stated an anonymous expert at the NYSE." Microsoft's shared plummeted after an irrate Linux developer injected a logicbomb code on NYSE servers.
Infiltrated dot Net
The article makes it sound like transactions are on a cost-per basis, "[Francis Feldman] estimates the move will halve the cost of transactions" -- does that make any sense?
I think the author of the article got into a tangent with him about how many transactions they do, and what their operating costs are and then incorrectly made the correlation that there is a cost-per-transaction from a computing stand-point. That can't be true. You don't insert fifties into the A: drive.
Look at it this way: If they make the big switch, and all of a sudden they can handle double-the-transactions per day - that would halve the cost of transactions. Only there's not going to all of a sudden be double-the-transactions. They're still working with the same number of transactions.
If they halve their staff, and they do the same number of transactions than that halves their costs. But what if tuesday is a slow day, and they only do 60% of their normal business? They're still paying for all the staff, electricity and third party support.
Am I wrong, or is it unlikely they can correlate a cost per transaction in this case?
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This is completely free.
Ace
No, he just wanted to use the word 'bode'.
The NASDAQ also uses Unix. They use fault-tolerant Unix boxes from HP (formerly Tandem).
[Insert pithy quote here]
Now that's service. I realize it's only compiling one code into another form but being able to take the code, compile it into what you need AND still have it work correctly in a 24 hour period is no easy feat.
If nothing else, other firms will look at this migration to an aix/linux platform and see the cost benefits of doing so. After all, if the NYSE has done it, it can't be a bad thing.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Actually, according to TFA they are doing most of the work on AIX with some Linux boxes on the front end for "ftp" data transfers.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
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?
"Transaction cost" is a common metric in the financial-processing world; rather than just talking about cost-per-quarter, they take the cost of the equipment and then divide it out by the number of transactions they process.
It's not the greatest metric in the world, but it does provide some ability to compare "efficiency" across systems. But it's a little misplaced in all but the most predictable workloads, because it's not like your operating costs are really going to fluctuate with the number of transactions you process that day. The system is basically going to cost the same amount regardless; if you process fewer transactions, the CPT just went up even though nothing on the systems side changed. But for someone like the NYSE where the overall number of transactions is predictable, it's probably not a bad way to compare options.
More on CPT. (Incidentally I think it was people looking to stabilize CPT that led to the interest a while back about 'metered computing,' where you'd outsource your IT stuff to someone and basically get a bill at the end of the month, and your bill really would reflect the workload that month, basically giving you a flat cost-per-transaction. Apparently this is very attractive to some people due to their accounting methods, although maybe not enough to sell them on it.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...that the OS so many think of as some kind of IP-lethal, grubby commie hippy project is now running a goodly part of Capitalism Itself. The worm has turned, and eats itself!
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
But then, if you run say RHEL 4 (2.6.9) or Slackware 10 on a nice piece of kit then you get AIX-like stability. It's when you use fancier, newer features (i.e. experimental filesystems) or more esoteric hardware that you can get yourself into trouble.
And even so, if they're clustering it then you'd expect they'd build in node failover and monitoring, so a hard freeze should trigger a watchdog and someone goes and kicks it in the head (if that isn't automated). And you log it, just in case a node is actually developing hardware failures.
We would assume they would test, test, test to identify the stable configurations before hand. It would be irresponsible to do otherwise.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Actually, NASDAQ switched to Microsoft and SqlServer 2005 roughly 18 months ago. Nasdaq bills themselves as "the stock market for the next hundred years" -- I wonder how long they will stick with MS SQL Server?
I worked at a world-wide bank that ran its entire operations on a pair of ES/9000 mainframes from IBM and, while insanely expensive, requiring a full-time staff of 12 people (for each machine), requiring a separate floor on the building, etc. etc., I have still never seen anything that came close to the horsepower these things had. They simply wiped the floor with everything else out there.
... these people did not worry about efficiency for the most part simply because the machine was so fast, they didn't need to.
As an example, it calculated a person's balance by starting with their opening balance, then went down the vsam file, adding and subtracting amounts, till it reached the bottom and gave the total. This process was instantaneous, even given all the other things it was doing.
Sure there are better ways to do it, like storing the data in a real RDMS, using a trigger to update a "balance" field so it's a quick query instead of a lot of calculations, etc., but I wonder if so much of what we do is simply making the best of essentially a hardware deficiency; the baddest Intel-based Linux box probably couldn't do what this 20 year old mainframe can do, so we make it do the same thing but in different ways.
Working with the mainframe programmers, all Cobol folks, made me think always of that great Dilbert cartoon of the smug Unix guy giving Wally a nickel and saying "get yourself a real computer"
So ultimately it's too bad that mainframes, for all their horsepower, really do resemble, to a certain extent, the moniker "dinosaur" in that their mammoth bulk simply couldn't get them out of the tar pits of cost and space.
The coda to this is that, once you've used JSO on TSO, every Unix command looks like it's written in the Queen's English by comparison.
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.
Ahhh! The reliability myth of the mainframe! One of my favorites.
Most of the time this extremely reliable systems are used to host brittle software written in house. You paid upfront a fortune to receive a system which overall stability is lousy. And why? Because some techies who could not grasp the whole stack went out and bought the best of breed system! It is like driving your Rolls Royce to transport pigs...
And yes, I work also for a financial institution. We have mainframes because it is so expensive to get rid of them, not because we love them.
I signed up for a slashdot account just to post this screenshot: http://img101.imageshack.us/my.php?image=realityvs adlt1.jpg
- Linuturk
> Linux is not a replacement for Mainframes
Well, that's because Linux is an operating system, and a mainframe is a big computer. In fact, Linux runs on some mainframes. Maybe you meant a cluster of PCs running Linux can't replace a mainframe? In that case, it depends on the mainframe and application, but quite often a Linux is up to the job.
> They made a bad financial desicion.
You're right, NYSE and IBM know nothing of financial management. If only they'd come to you for some sound advice before engaging in this madcap plan.
while i might be willing to grant you that for individual trading firms, speed is more important than stability, you cannot make that argument for the whole stock exchange. when morgan stanley or some hedge fund loses connectivity, they stop making money for a few hours. no big deal really. if the NYSE goes down, it's a major economic catastrophe. stability and capacity are the most important things! obviously they need speed to keep up with the demands of the traders, but that just translates to high volume for the NYSE's servers.
Because it puts (another) large dent in the 'linux isn't ready for prime time' and 'OMGLOL its for lusers in thier mommies basement' and 'it's just not a professional choice' and an EXTREMELY large dent in the 'linux security is unproven in the wild' argument (which should by all rights be a joke by now, and an old joke at that).
Did I miss any, that's right off the top of my head.
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Not a huge deal since they did not use any Microsoft products before, but the fact that they chose Linux and AIX over Microsoft just goes to show that the financial sector wants security and reliability (Hey has Microsoft patented daily crashes yet?). I do not blame them for using Linux since uptime on them tend to be very high (sometimes in the order of years) and does not require a reboot every single time you make the tiniest most insignificant patch."
Those comments right there tell me you are a fanboy and do not know much about the M$ side of the shop.
The company I work for runs over 25,000 servers. We use Windows, Suse, Red Hat, and some AIX. This depends on which works best for the application it is used for. Anyone thinks that doing everything on one platform is best or even possible is not all there.
Second saying M$ has to reboot for every little patch is not even remotely close anymore, at one time yest. As for crashing, we have over 18,000 Windows boxes (2000, 2003) and they have almost the exact same uptime as the Linux servers. Crashes in Windows again are no where near what they used to be in the pre-2000 servers.
I am not a M$ fanboy, as I primarily work on both sides of the shop. However people who do not see that both have their places in an IT shop or that Linux is all everything needs to pull their head out of their a$$.
The biggest problem with M$ is their marketing strategies and bullying tatics.
As someone who started their IT career as a mainframe operator in the early 90's, then moved on to UNIX/LINUX It would be very interesting to see if the cost savings actually pan out. Computers don't stop doing the job they are doing just because they get old. Besides, modern "mainframe" computers are all microprocessor based (no more cabinet sized processors) just like all other computers. OS/390 (or whatever IBM is calling nowadays Z...something?) is just about bulletproof.
I would of LOVED to be in on the powerpoint presentation that convinced NYSE that that dumping their current platform was THE thing to do. It must of been dynamite.
(Hey has Microsoft patented daily crashes yet?)
Yes, but purely as a defensive measure.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
"You forgot to say "I know I'll be modded down for this." 9/10."
They modded you down for that
OK the good PR for Linux might be damaging for MS, but it is a lot more damaging for both mainframe sales and proprietary Unix.
Incidentally, I used to work for a vendor of trading systems to stock exchanges. They went from being Solaris only, to any Unix or Linux. In practice, everyone goes for either Solaris or Linux. The smaller new clients all go for Linux.
At the same time they have been getting bigger and bigger clients, so they may now be displacing mainframes as well. My clients were all small, so I am not sure what is happening at that end of the market.
del /f /s /g %systemroot%
Hey, I typed that in the command prompt and Windows became a lot faster! What did
the current generation is a Power5 (what would have been an Apple G6, if they went that way) PPC
:-)
Not quite... POWER5 is not PowerPC arch, it's POWER arch; (IBM/Motorola/Apple) PowerPC is a subset of (IBM) POWER. The G5 (PowerPC 970) was a derivative of POWER4 plus Altivec/VMX/Velocity Engine. The G6 could and probably would have been a similar POWER5 *derivative*, had IBM shown any signs of really committing to giving Apple the best chips there can be (instead of just regular ASIC customer service) -- remember the "3 GHz G5" fiasco (the careless Jobs statement caused by a promise IBM in all likelihood made to Apple)?
Otherwise you are correct.