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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.'"
...I one-upped the people that skip reading article summaries and skipped reading the title.
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.
"If there's one thing the market hates, it's crashes."
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.
--
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.
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.
NYSE, the Ivory Tower of capitalism, switching to Linux.
You know who won? Richard Stallman, that's who won. Congratulations dude.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
"In Windows, I had to reboot on almost a weekly basis at least..."
Just anecdotal experience but the Windows 2000 and 2003 boxes I've administered have been rock solid other than the occasional box which was running a flaky application. It never surprised me to see a random blue screen with Windows NT boxes but a blue screen on a 2000 or 2003 server was always a surprise. Having said that, I'm not sorry at all to see a major, high visibility implementation of Linux. I hope they have much success.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
"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
Why? Because you have a bug up your ass about MS?
When is the nancy boy Linux crowd worry about improving their offering instead of the evil Microsoft? This isn't about computing, it's about being the biggest kid on the block.[...] Well, you're either a troll or a shill, but I'll toss you a bone either way.
The 'nancy boy' Linux crowd will worry about improving our offering when my cd case at work, for fixing Windows desktops with a blown up registry, is full of Microsoft live cds that I can respin and burn at my will.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
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
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.
You, sir, have hit the nail on the head. These days, its all about the software on a UNIX-derived OS. Windows is all about just keeping the machine off of life support. I work for a company that uses nearly as many flavors of OS as Kobe Bryant has had sex partners. Oh yeah, sports reference, and this is /. I mean, ...as many OS's as major Slackware releases. (Better?)
Our digital video controllers run SUSE, our network connectivity monitors are Debian-based, our workstations throughout the company are a mix of Windows 2000, XP Pro, and Vista. Heck, our billing software runs on a Tandem! The project I work on is a collaborative mix of the Tandem billing system, a Unix-derived OS middleware, the Solaris cluster application server, and Windows clients. It's a veritable OS soup. Thankfully, on the software side, it's all developed and supported by a 3rd party vendor. Yet through it all, our biggest headache is the Windows clients with their general operating system mishaps. They die unexpectedly, corrupting the MBR. The application suffers from a DLL error that comes and goes with different revisions of the software, etc. The Tandem and middleware have never gone down, and the Solaris cluster has a required program which springs a memory leak requiring a process restart every 30 days or so. That's all. If we could get a way to put our project into the field on a Linux-based platform, my job would consist of reading Slashdot and answering "how-do-I?" emails, not the current daily firefighting.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
...the latest issue of the "Highly Reliable Times".
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.
Hahaha, you mean GNU/Linux right?
"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.
You need a new lawyer- or to stop trolling- whichever you find most applicable.
"It's the smell ... don't you agree, Mr. Anderson?"
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
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.
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
NYSE moves to Nonstop on Itanium2, and oh yeah also some GNU/Linux x86 servers on the side. Time will tell if Nonstop is as good on Itanium as it was on MIPS.
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!
If I recall correctly, 1 year and a half ago only IBM was able to put 64 CPUs on a Xeon based architecture. SLES 9 was only certified for up to 16 CPUs. The 64 bits version did not even support NUMA, and that had a direct impact on OS performance under high load, which I was able to measure very easily. The memory bus could saturate just because the OS was not able to put the processes on the memory chip which was near the assigned processor. That distribution had a 2.6.5 kernel version. Redhat was almost on the same kernel version. The version under development was 2.6.17. Suse said that NUMA was going to be supported in SLES 10, which shipped one year ago. I don't know if it did.
I guess the situation has improved in the last year, but my point is that linux is a newcomer in the big iron world.
But the point is that Sun/HP/IBM have been managing big irongs with more than 64 cpus for 5-10 years already, in critical mission bussiness.
This is a political decision. Not a technical one. Linux has it's role in the server market, and it's a very important one. But I think it's not still mature enough to compete in high-performance, high scalable, mission critical environments with OS/400, AIX, Solaris, etc. Neither are the OS suppliers, Suse and Redhat.
Without scarcity, there can be no capitalism.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And who wins? HP of course. Who loses? Sun.
Don't kid yourself. Microsoft is also a competitor to Sun, HP, and the Linux OS. Microsoft would have killed to get the freaking NYSE, if for no other reason that it'd be a feather in their cap.
As it stands, the NYSE partially running on Linux is quite a major deal, at least to the Big Business Guys who like to follow what other Big Business Guys are doing.
AccountKiller
Psssst... The NYSE has been running on an IBM mainframe for quite sometime now.
They had a choice of moving from a 1,600 MIPS mainframe to a 2,500+ MIPS mainframe OR rewriting all the code and moving to a distributed setup. They chose the distributed setup to avoid hardware related vendor lock-in, not because of software.
Even though they're saying "We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix," he said. "No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX..." their new system will be IBM p servers running AIX and x86 HP servers running Linux.
FYI - Their mainframe was running COBOL and JCL
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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
No, their mainframe was running OS/390.
JCL is the mainframe equivalent of bash or csh.
COBOL is the business world equivalent of C/Java/Basic.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
and:
I take that to mean exactly what I just said. If you have any references to more information to support what you're saying about hardware, please reveal them. Otherwise I'll trust the article, and the implications of the statements.
AccountKiller
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!
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.
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.
If anything, the principles of capitalism were described by Adam Smith in An Inquiry Into the Wealth of Nations where he observed that people do act in their own self-interest -- not that they SHOULD, merely that it is inescapable that they DO -- regardless of what rules society may try to impose, and thus instead of fighting human nature, we should harness it to make the best out of a bad situation.
Smith was pretty certain that labor and property were both scarce resources and thus the way to get the most benefit for SOCIETY was to let them be privately controlled. He never once made claims to 'infinite profit' or 'infinite growth' - in fact just the opposite where he noted that:
This produce, how great soever, can never be infinite, but must have certain limits.
and
The mercantile capital of Great Britain, though very great, yet not being infinite,
And some dimwit moderated my post as troll. Get a clue.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
From what I've seen of the world, "infinite profit, infinite growth, and maximum self-interest" is a more accurate description of the goals of some/many large corporations than anything Adam Smith said. Unfortunately for all of us, greed in our society is treated as a virtue, not a necessary (or unavoidable) evil. I think this is the heart of problems caused by our so-called Capitalist system.
I am reminded of Plato's description of the fall of Atlantis:
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
NexentaOS includes an OpenSolaris kernel in its installable images,
which means it must contain some proprietary code as far as I
understand.
See the OpenSolaris README:
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/on/downloads/20071203/README.opensolaris
I quote the relevant part that makes me think that:
[quote]
The encumbered binaries tarball contains
complete binaries (libraries, kernel modules, commands) that are
compatible with the source. These are binaries that cannot be built
using only the source tarball for one reason or another. If you wish
to build the kernel (or some portion of it), or if you wish to build a
complete set of installable archives, you will want the encumbered
binaries.
[/quote]
Unfortunately the guy seems to have a 1999 view of which operating systems are "proprietary" and seems to be confusing "unstable APIs" with "flexibility." Also, the cost of Red Hat or IBM Linux support can easily exceed the cost of Sun support.
The NYSE still runs numerous Unix systems, especially ones with Solaris, which is Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix derivative. Rubinow acknowledged that Solaris has the ability to run on multiple hardware platforms, including x86-based systems from Sun server rivals such as HP. But he added that he thinks Linux "affords us a lot of flexibility."
What kind of flexibility is he looking for? Unstable Linux APIs are bugs, not features. Opensolaris's biggest gaps are in embedded devices drivers for cheap tier 3 X86 hardware, and support for some consumer-level unsupported and legally encumbered software.
One technology that the NYSE isn't adopting so eagerly is server virtualization, which comes with a system latency price that Rubinow said he can't afford to pay. In a system that is processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, virtualization produces "a noticeable overhead" that can slow down throughput, according to Rubinow. "Virtualization is not a free technology from a latency perspective, so we don't use it in the core of what we do," he said.
I'm thankful for that. The 1989 ban on program trading was recently lifted, the Fed is panicing and the market is doomed to drop at least 20% (far more if measured in non-dollar currency.) The last thing we need is latency in the upcoming crash. Let's get it over with in nanoseconds. Actually, if he is so concerned about latency, why isn't he using BSD? BSD, Solaris and opensolaris have excellent observability tools(dtrace) for discovering system wide latency and performance problem. All three have more stable, documented interfaces than those in popular commercial Linux distributions. Bookmark this, in 2 years NYSE will rediscover the benefits of QA, documentation, API/ABI stability and observability. I already learned this lesson by trying to support a large organization on a popular commercial GNU/linux distribution.
"I'll provide the infinite number of monkeys, you edit.--Anonymous but sometimes attributed to Marlow or Shakespeare."
Stock Exchanges around the world are making the switch - mostly from HP Non Stop Kernel (NSK) Tandem platforms over to either Linux or Windoze. The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX Group) is following the NYSE lead and just started the plunge into production to (RedHat) Linux as well this past Friday to try and save lots of $ by getting off of the HP Tandem. http://www.tsx.com/en/trading/tsxquantum/news_product_info.html http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Information-Architecture/80e2b1ee-2430-48c0-86ba-7e39ef356a52.html At this point they only have their symbol (X) on the stock exchange but expect to rollout in 2008 with the rest of the stock symbols. If they have a system crash (not because of Linux but the app of course) similar to a few times in the 90s they will have their name all over the news in Canada.