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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.
"If there's one thing the market hates, it's crashes."
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.
Why, what's your stake? So people use desktop Linux at home. I do. Doesn't that make you mad? I love that. My wife runs Linux on her computer, too. My kids do, too. Does that piss you off? I'm glad. Lots of the people I work with use Linux on a home desktop, too. Linux is better than Microsoft in every way. Doesn't that just whip you into a foaming mad frenzy? Lots and lots of people use Linux every day, and they're smug and happy and laughing at you. Are you busting a blood vessel yet? I sure hope 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
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.
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?
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
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!
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
Anyway if this is a success (and there is no reason it shouldn't be) and since Linux excels on the server (and frankly is perfectly suited to 90% of corporate desktops) this kind of public roll out is a great selling point and a driver for others large and small to do the same, after all little 10 man operations can suddenly point to their two Linux mail servers and proudly tell their clients that they are using the same technology as the NYSE! (Not the same software or the same hardware (and definitely without the SLA's and support) but the same technology....:) ) .
For those nut bothering to read the links - salient parts are: As part of its strategy to win more trading business and new customers, the London Stock Exchange needed a scalable, reliable, high-performance stock exchange ticker plant to replace its earlier system. Roughly 40 per cent of the Exchange's revenues are generated by the sale of real-time information about stock prices. Using the Microsoft®
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!
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.
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