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NYSE Moves to Linux
blitzkrieg3 writes "The New York Times is reporting on how the NYSE group now feels that Linux is 'mature enough' for the New York Stock Exchange. They are using commodity x86 based Hewlett-Packard hardware and Linux in place of their traditional UNIX machines. From NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow: 'We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix. No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX, and we feel the same way to some extent about Solaris. Other reasons cited for the switch were increased flexibility and lower cost.'"
It should be noted that the problems the NYSE is dealing with are very remote from those that the average desktop user is.
Now I know this seems obvious, but the "WOW if the NYSE is doing it!" crowd should try and control themselves at least a little.
And who wins? HP of course. Who loses? Sun. Now if they had switched to/from Windows, then it'd be big news. As it is, it's not that big of a deal since Linux is in plenty of mission critical systems. The hospital I used to work at had Linux machines controlling their linear accelerators in radiation oncology.
Deleted
Linux this, KDE that, Wikipedia here... What all of Free has in common is "Openness" - imagine twenty years from now: I believe that more and more content will move towards a modern variation of the "stone soup" parable until its the defacto standard. Openness allows the rapid creation and innovation of practically anything under the sun. And that pool only gets larger everyday. The only thing that can stop it is if government explicity steps in and makes giving away your effort illegal - other than that it is simply inevitable, give or take twenty years - that Openness will be the primary regulating force for all manner of content.
Shh.
The NASDAQ exchange, which has always focused more on technology, is totally a Microsoft fanboy. Maybe that's because MSFT is the largest stock on the NASDAQ exchange.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
so you work with systems that are either poorly maintained or run buggy software. Having worked with all the major flavors of Unix over almost twenty years, I've found the major GNU/Linux distros can be just as reliable. And I've encountered the occasional core-dumping bugs in HPUX, Solaris, AIX that were show stoppers (read patch lists for any of them, *someone* had to be a victim of the bad oopses.) Windows is a desktop system that's been stretched into something it had no business attempting, though maybe server 2003 is good enough for enterprise use.
It's just a pity that Oracle doesn't think so.
It is not that trivial a case.
I visited the trading floor (of which not much exists now -compared to past) in August. The desktops the traders used were Windows XP - Linux in an equal split. Presumably the back-end servers is what they are talking about here which according to the story was Unix. So it is a case where Microsoft had managed to get a foothold in a Unix only shop in the desktop and failed to leverage their monopoly power to capture the Server market.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
you must be confusing opensolaris with solaris, you won't be recompiling your Sun-mandated & supported closed source solaris. If you ran opensolaris you'd be totally unsupported.
Right I know, it's economics, accounting, Wallstreet math. Blah blah. I had those classes too. I am really not every sympathetic to billion dollar businesses potential for failure.
A) It won't happen because the Gov would just bail them out on our dime (ala the airlines the last few years) B) "The Bells" in particular have stuffed enough tax breaks and kick backs into their pockets over the years, fuck them and their "4 million / hour."
No sig for you!!
Sure, those options work, but I think you overlooked one of the most obvious solutions. If you're running a business that depends on a Linux-based solution, and you encounter a bug that seriously degrades your platform's stability, you always have the option of hiring a programmer to develop a patch.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
You're right.
A typical patch from Microsoft takes years, if at all.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Maybe he's saying it's no better (nor worse) than Solaris with an uber-expensive support license? I don't know.
Very few businesses really care much about the sticker price of an operating system. What many businesses are catching on to is that Linux has little to no vendor lock-in. It goes something like this:
Develop all your software and systems on one Linux. Then find out you don't like HP? Fine.. take your business to Dell. The distribution they're running on starts to suck rocks? No problem, switch to RHEL. RHEL starts to not meet your needs? Customize your own distribution.
Not being tying your business to the whims of whatever company you're dealing with is truly powerful. If you ask me, that's the real power of Linux, and open source software. Linux makes operating systems into a true commodity like grain, where switching to another vendor is low cost.
AccountKiller
If you have the source code to the software you use then you have the ability to both change support agreements (albeit you still have to find a competent firm to do the work), if as you suggest, get a part open part closed system you are getting rid of most of the benefits of the open source part.
I agree to a certain extent 'that it would probably be no more or less difficult to switch Linux vendors/supporters than a Commercial Unix variant' in certain cases (any very large complex or heavily customised implementation) but for *most* companies that wouldn't be an issue, mail servers, network services etc.. the core of a companies IT infrastructure would be made up of common and well tested components, supportable by anyone, custom database or web applications would be more difficult to transition to a new support provider, but if they are *yours* and open then at least you *can*.
As for market share, I'm not sure. It is clear that Linux is replacing Unix in some areas, but it is also making inroads the areas where Microsoft is traditionally dominant.
Most recently notable comes from the Gartner group : Here
The Gartner group, while I've never completely believed in, states that Linux will kill off most large installations of Iron Unicies by 2009. While I believe this is a bit optimistic and the reality is that it will never truly die, Linux continues to take more market share away from other UNIX installations than Windows.
the answer to five 9s uptime is to stop building systems that rely on single points of failure. Compare Google's approach to processing and uptime to that of the mainframe era. Totally different infrastructures with similar goals and globally, similar uptimes/reliabilities. Design your systems such that any component (any switch, router, power supply, hard drive, server ... to a certain degree, even any individual data center) can fail without resulting in a loss of data. Sure, it's complicated - but it can be done, and it's definitely the direction that network and systems architectures are headed.
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
That's absolutely true.
Microsoft would have really liked to have that contract though. Both for the revenue and for the bragging rights.
So it, indeed, is not eating into Microsoft's market share, but it did slow their growth, however slightly.
Nope it's Linux. It's happened to some of my customers as well. Obviously it doesn't happen to everyone, but it does happen. I've also had customers on AIX and Solaris that choke up, but they do under much higher usage and much more rarely. If all you do is server web pages, you might get 5 nines, but start dealing with systems that really pound the memory subsystem and you'll see linux start to choke. This was on RHEL3 (was still under support by the way) but it happened under RHEL4 as well. No idea how RHEL5 fares nowadays.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Fixed that for you.
If Windows was running somewhere with high visibility and intense needs like the NYSE, Microsoft would have the problem fixed extremely quickly.
Or at least come with a fix for that situation (and that only). The other customers will probably wait weeks or months for that fix