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The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole Day
Colin Smith writes "TradElect, the Microsoft .Net based trading platform for the London Stock Exchange, was offline for about seven hours, meaning that their 5-nines SLAs are shot for approximately the next 100 years. The TradElect system was launched back in June of 2007 and was designed for increased speed and system capacity."
Assuming 8.5 hour trading day (0700-1530) and 250 trading days/year. Maybe a squirrel caused the problem ... ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I wish people would get into the habit of linking to the single page version of the FA.
The summary implies that TradElect was responsible for the shutdown, but according to the stock exchange itself, it wasn't the case. They say instead it was a network problem.
When I worked in academia I used to collaborate on a research project with a data architect from one of the major electronic exchanges. His whole shop is MS and .NET. I asked him why he didn't run Linux / Unix. He said that with competent guys the MS boxes had great uptime. Wall Street can afford to pay the top salaries so they attract guys who really know their stuff. Not just semi-competent people who managed to sit through an MSCE exam. [his words not mine]
Also he said support was crucial for his company. If something went down, he wanted to be able to call someone immediately. He couldn't afford to just post a question on a message board and hope someone replies. He wanted contracts with 3rd party support that had experience with similar huge enterprise systems that he had.
When I said there were companies who could provide excellent Linux support, he said his ass was on the line if something broke so he wanted to be able to justify his software choice to the the C-level guys. And those guys knew the name Microsoft. So he didn't see anything else as an option.
Which from the sounds of this article http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/06/12/231031/agile-trading-software-critical-to-london-stock-exchange.htm was the intent.
One very interesting note is at the end of the article:
Timeline for Tradelect upgrades
18 June 2007: Tradelect launched, reducing the time taken to process trades from 140 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds. Capacity increased from 593 to 2,500 orders a second.
November 2007: Version 2 upgrade. Trading time reduced from 10 milliseconds to about 6 milliseconds. Capacity increased by 70% from 2,500 to 4,200 orders a second. Introduced full suite of Mifid-compliant services.
September 2008: Planned migration of Italian trades to Tradelect platform.
September 2008: Tradelect Version 2 to launch. Plans to double trading capacity to 10,000 continuous messages per second. Aims to cut average time taken to complete a trade by half from 6 milliseconds to 3 milliseconds.
Coincidence that this month was when they intended to release a new version?
5 nines does not mean what you think it means.
No, you're right. By my calculation, the actual figure is more like 360 years.
(Remember, this is a system that only operates 7.5 hours per day, 250 days per year)
No, he'd waggle his arse .
A fanny would be a vagina in Britain.
Come on +5 informative!
The article here blames it on some sort of botched upgrade.
Here: http://www.londonstockexchange.com/en-gb/products/membershiptrading/tradingservices/Incident/LIVE
Notice that there were several unsuccessful attempts to bring it back up.
What's really pitiful, LSE has just a fraction of data/trade volume of major US exchanges like Nasdaq or NYSE and still, their systems are regularly getting hosed, albeit not as much as today's meltdown.
Hopefully in coming years LSE will lose market share to Nasdaq/Europe, BATS/Europe, Chi-X and other electronic markets - that should teach them well.
Well, the Reuters article does say that trading started normally, but some traders were unable to connect, so the whole exchange was bought down to avoid unfair advantage/disadvantage occurring, so actually both stories are consistent.
That was the their first mistake. What were they thinking? You need a 3 highly available Unix clusters with three SANs. You need three to elect a quorum. If you don't know what a quorum is you shouldn't be attempting to design system that is supposed to deliver on a 5-nine SLA. Each geographic location should include 1 cluster and 1 SAN. All three locations networked with dark fiber. fiber routing should be set up so that a cluster can fail over to a SAN in another location. As far as Hardware is concerned, I would go with a cluster of IBM P6-570 and use an EMC Symmetrix DMX SAN at each site. .Net trading platform.. I have to laugh! Microsoft .net = 5.none SLA! .Net is only good for people who would like to create a light duty website. Under a load it breaks. The London Stock Exchange proves my point.
Who the heck designed this?