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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.'"
"If there's one thing the market hates, it's crashes."
No fooling.
I used to work on Amdhall's unix for their mainframes. Among other things it was used by brokerages to support trading and all the Baby Bells to support data collection for billing.
If a baby bell's billing system went down all the phone calls dialed, started, or completed while it was down were free. This made downtime cost something like $4 million / hour.
Brokerage support going down cost far more.
So imagine a trading system going down (equivalent to all the brokerages going down at the same time...)
Needless to say, much of the point of mainframes is to keep this from ever happening.
So the hardware is built so it performs the correct computation despite component failures, radiation-flipped bits, or on-the-fly hardware changes (adding/deleting/resizing peripherals, CPUs memory, switching out failing components), etc. And the software is built to similar standards.
This can cause problems. Like sizing event counters to stand uptime measured in decades. Or getting non-critical patches installed. (I recall a minor patch to a driver, too small to rate forcing a couple million bux worth of reboot, that had been installed on all the customers' machines to go live at the next reboot. Two years later (last I heard) they were still supporting the bug because some systems hadn't rebooted yet...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If Linux has a bug that diminishes uptime at the NYSE and if the Linux "team" of volunteer programmers does not offer a fix within 24 hours, then HP management will order its commercial slave programmers to develop a solution -- pronto.
If a you or I encountered a bug in our Linux downloaded from the Web for free, we would have no immediate remedy to our problem. We must wait for the next release, which could take weeks.
"Oh just go away with the no more BSOD's on windows XP ec. bullshit. Yeah, like random reboots are all that much better. Yes, we all know, there is now a windows service that initiates at boot and monitors the system for a crash that would initiate a BSOD, so instead this service reboots the system, like really fucking cool and useful that, a genuine marketdroid M$=B$ exercise in marketing (same number of crashes you only choose whether you BSOD by disabling the service or random reboot)."
Wow, who pissed in your Cheerios? I didn't think I said anything that warranted being treated like a MS fanboy. How did XP find its way into the discussion? I was talking about servers and the servers I ran were mostly rock solid with negligible BSOD or random reboots that were always traceable to the applications they ran or flaky hardware like PCI serial boards or the serial devices that attach to them.
Get a grip dude.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Well Guys...
For what it's worth:
When I went to Iraq, I had a laptop running ubuntu. I setup apache2, php5, and mysql5. We created our own "series of tubes" in our barracks area and I supplied our own intranet website (read: porn server). Oh, and America's Army server.
This thing ran for several months at a time without a reboot. The only reboots were due to other problems, like when a stray 7.62mm bullet knocked out our generator one time, but as for linux running...this thing ran like a champ. In 11 months of service, it never had a problem.
Of course, it wasn't under the same kind of load. But my NIC was usually maxed out for 40% of the day.
For consumer-grade hardware with free and open software, 0% downtime not energy related, I feel that Linux did a fine job. Seriously, 11 months, 3 reboots due to power. Nice.
THL phish sticks
You know, if you don't even bother to reformat your article, it really does sound like a cut'n'paste troll. Let's check...
Well, here's one. Must be a fairly new cut'n'paste troll.
I'll have some fun with it anyway, and feel free to copy and paste my response anywhere you see this troll:
That really dates this troll, or at least, the troll wants us to think it is that out of touch. Seriously, who uses TokenRing or ext2? (Oh, and you can defrag ext2, if you really, really want to.)
Sucks to be you. Try reading the license.
That's General Public License.
Indeed it does, but only to whoever you distribute binaries to.
If you're sending free binaries to your competitors, sure. But you'd have to be retarded to do that.
Absolutely untrue.
If you're rewriting it anyway, why not give away your hard work? Worked well for id software.
And of course, no mention of exactly how that's more fair, other than this comparison to such a strawman GPL.
Except, of course, a top online investment firm kind of proves you wrong there. I'll point to Amazon EC2 and consider the discussion closed.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"I never thought I'd see these two words together. UNIX is what happens when you meet a set of interfaces defined by a standards body known as The Open Group."
"Proprietary" is not the opposite of "standard." Nor is it the opposite of "open." It is entirely possible, and in fact almost inescapable, to have an open, standard, product that is also proprietary.
Automobiles are based on open standards, which is why you don't have to buy Ford gas, drive on Ford roads, or even use Ford spark plugs. But Ford automobiles are proprietary. They're proprietary implementations of a complex set of open standards.
Similarly, UNIX, or at least "Unix," is a set of open standards (although UNIX branding is proprietary). Solaris is a proprietary implementation of Unix that happens to run on over 900 different systems from tons of companies, and is sold by Sun, IBM, Dell, and Fujitsu, among others. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a proprietary Unix-like operating system that runs on a plethora of systems that is also open sourced.
The point here is that for all intents and purposes, "proprietary" is a null operator and can be safely ignored. Its major use is to identify people with a particular axe to grind.
Of all the OSes I've ever used, Windows is the only one that would slowly eat itself over time. Current versions of it are much, much better about this sort of thing, but Windows is the only one that has ever done that at all. I've seen other OSes crash before, and I've even seen them occasionally corrupt a filesytem (well, once...and that was a particularly crappy version of System Vr4). But Windows is the only one I've ever seen that would, after running long enough (where "long enough" depends on which version of Windows you're talking about), start to develop weird, unexplainable problems and generally get very unreliable -- on hardware that proved itself reliable afterwards.
I don't think Windows was release-ready until well after the release of Windows 2000.
As I said, it's significantly better these days, if you exclude Vista (I don't have any experience with Vista so I can't really comment on it). But chances are, that's because what's out there these days has been in the field for years and it's taken that long to work out all the major bugs. No other operating system I've ever used has been like that.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
it is my experience that Linux is not yet reliable for mission critical stuff
I work for NASA (who coined the term "mission critical") and we think it's ready. The IBM A31p laptops onboard the Space Station were recently switched to Redhat. These are the laptops that command to the core computer system and control the vehicle, not just some random payload.
Mission Control in Houston is in the process of switching to RHEL based systems, and should be complete sometime next year.
Worst...sig...ever!
I have never really understood the analogy between Linux and Communism. MS seems more communistic than Linux, under the Ideal Microsoft world (TM) we would all be running Microsoft Windows Desktop OS (TM) connected to Microsoft Windows Server (TM) using Microsoft Office (TM) with Microsoft Exchange (TM) chatting via Microsoft Live Messenger, visiting web pages on www.msnbc.com (ninemsn.com.au for Aussies) or playing video games on Microsoft Games For Windows Live (TM).
Microsoft seems to want to control every bit of software installed on PC's, this seems more in line with the policies of a Soviet nation rather than that of a free (market) nation even though there business model is extremely capitalistic.
Linux on the other hand seems to be a free market OS (maybe not quiet capitalistic), imposing few restrictions on what you can do with it, giving you plenty of choices between distro's. Capitalism in my (simplified) definition is to make as much money as possible (sometimes without caring how) not to help other megacorps extend their monopoly.
If Linux works for the NYSE better than the competition be it Windows, Solaris or AIX there is nothing communist about it, it just looks like the free market at work to me. BTW I wont argue that parts of the GPL aren't communist-like but you don't need to be bound by the GPL just to run Linux or build an app to run on Linux.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I worked for the RI Sec of State's office for nearly four years. In that time I saw us go from a 90% OSS shop to a 50% OSS shop because the incoming I.T. director was a Windows only guy.
But the best part is the Windows migration isn't going so well. I left back in September but they had just bought new servers about five months before. They got no further than Server 2003 being installed on them due to documentation procedures, etc.
One server was to be an Exchange 2003 server to replace the Qmail server they were using. I just got email from someone there the other day and guess what, it's still Qmail.
The big push to Exchange btw was a woman named Catherine Avila, the Director of Administration. She was petrified that I.T. could potentially read her email because Qmail stored everything in the users home folder.
When I'd left the tally for hardware and software was up around $60,000. Both we systems guys loudly protested the Exchange bit. Also told them that if you were going to present an Exchange box to to world, you damn well better put something in front of it to stop the bullshit.
And of course when I left I made a prediction that within two months of my departure there'd be some catastrophic event. Sure enough, their web server crapped. The server in question was a LAMP box, and MySQL needs to be tuned occasionally to fix kludgy indices and queries. And that's what brought their web server down. There was a MySQL slave on the box that started consuming mass CPU cycles because of bad queries.
The PR guy said it was a rootkit. I call bullshit.