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.'"

Comments

no fooling.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

"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...)

Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[reporter]

Although Linux is free, the NYSE did not simply download Linux and install it on some Hewlett-Packard (HP) hardware purchased through Costco. The NYSE purchased a packaged solution from HP (or another solutions bundler like Accenture), and HP will guarantee that this installation of Linux will be reliable to 6 sigma. The contract between the NYSE and HP will likely include some sort of guaranteed uptime.

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.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[Chris Mattern]

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.

And this is different from other OSes the average person can buy...how, exactly?

Chris Mattern

Linux uptime.

[gandhi_2]

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.

Re:Hope the license doesn't give them trouble.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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:

(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system)

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.)

So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use.

Sucks to be you. Try reading the license.

It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License.

That's General Public License.

Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available.

Indeed it does, but only to whoever you distribute binaries to.

Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors.

If you're sending free binaries to your competitors, sure. But you'd have to be retarded to do that.

Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released.

Absolutely untrue.

We could either give away our hard work, or come up with another solution.

If you're rewriting it anyway, why not give away your hard work? Worked well for id software.

I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".

And of course, no mention of exactly how that's more fair, other than this comparison to such a strawman GPL.

Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure it remains only a bit player.

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.

Re:Reliability

[cyclone96]

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.

Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[mjwx]

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.