Slashdot Mirror
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!
Cancel or Allow?
Wait, what are we talking about again?
I hate printers.
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.
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 :)
Windows isn't more reliable ... but the programmers might be a little more sympathetic to user needs ...
... just trust me on this one ... people like them." ... so when someone buys one, register an 'option purchase' plus a 'bond purchase' by going under this menu ... then use this 'merge' feature ..."
"Okay, so how do I register the exchange of a convertible bond on Linux?"
"Er... why would you want to do that?"
"Um
"Well, what's a convertible bond?"
"It's where the holder gets a fixed interest payment and then at maturity, has the option to get a fixed amount of cash, or a fixed amount of stock, his choice."
"That's stupid, you don't need that."
"Um, look, dude, people trade them, so the software has to handle it."
"Well, that's really just a bond attached to a stock option. So just enter it that way."
"Yeah, but in the financial world, it's one transaction."
"Okay
"Holy **** dude, this is a common transaction, why do I have do go through all that every time someone buys a convertible bond?"
"Well, people don't even really buy them that much, do they?"
"I give up."
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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.
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."
No, he just wanted to use the word 'bode'.
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
the windows version just assumes if you select cash once to always do cash, unless you edit the registry key autoSelectMaturityAction to false
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
...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.
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.