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."

Comments

Oh, my.

[cp.tar]

So what happens when this happens again?

Re:Oh, my.

[im_thatoneguy]

Actually this is "again".

The LSE used to run on HP-NonStop (w/ Cobol and C as far as I can find) but still managed to take itself down for 8 hours in 2000.

If they're going to go down for a day every 7-8 years it might as well be cheaper and faster. (Articles quote the CTO as citing 10x performance increases).

(All based on a quick google search)

So before the hounds descend upon Microsoft it would seem the LSE has a history managing to bring down whatever system they run on.

Re:Oh, my.

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell can you 'complete' a trade in 3 ms?

Is there a hard drive out there that can even complete a write in 3ms?

Re:Oh, my.

[gbjbaanb]

I think its all about network latency - ie the marketing machine says 3ms, but they are referring to the time taken to get the message to the stock exchange's switch.

A Computer Weekly article (and its first link) explains it - basically, they replaced the old networks with new fibre-based ones and colocated servers for brokerages.

ketan

[ketan324]

The LSE going down is a big deal. The US exchanges have been trying very hard to displace LSE's strong hold in the EUROPEAN markets. With the merger of NYSE/Euronext and NASDAQ/OMX this cuts market share and faith in LSE as everyday passes. Additionally with continued tech issues, NASDAQ could reinvigorate their bid for LSE again! I work for a data major data vendor, and I know from experience the NYSE and NASDAQ are much more reliable than their European counterparts. Also LSE going down today is huge, considering the news on Fannie/Freddie, WAMU, Lehman, and the WRONG news on United Airlines. Many arbitrage opportunities were lost for LSE traders.

Re:Good lord, they're running on Windows? Why?

[SimonBelmont]

Even if MS is able to make Windows good at what it is and generally reliable, what it is is not a high-SLA platform intended for mission critical systems, so there's really no excuse. I don't think NSA/CIA/DoD would say, "The security model of Windows isn't quite as bad as the /. crowd likes to say it is. Sure, we haven't reviewed it, but the IT guy says it will help us leverage synergy to effect better ROI."

Re:What do Brits say when stuff like this happens?

[julesh]

You've seen the first scene of "four weddings and a funeral", surely?

Re:Misleading summary

[caluml]

Although:

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which uses the LSE's trading platform TradElect, also suspended trading.

Hmm. Smells like a new version to me.

Re:Misleading summary

[mashade]

Yep, I remembered and laughed so hard I had to put the images next to each other:

http://tipotheday.com/2008/09/08/microsofts-foot-in-mouth-london-stock-exchange/

Re:Good lord, they're running on Windows? Why?

[Alex Pennace]

You have hit the nail right on the head.

I'd like to suggest another factor: Stability-conscious developers -- those that know about race conditions, memory leaks, atomic transactions, and the like -- tend to gravitate towards operating systems that make it easy to put their ideas into practice.

That isn't to say Windows is inherently unstable, it just means that it is more difficult to write a stable and reliable application on that platform. And even if you think you got all your bases covered, you can still get blindsided by depending on poorly written code churned out by some .NET developer who was happy enough to ship something that appeared to work most of the time.

The good developers then shrug and say Windows is not suitable for critical computing, and go back to UNIX-ish platforms or whatever they are more comfortable with. Rushing into that void are legions of Windows developers who are also happy enough to ship something that appeared to work most of the time, and the cycle continues.

Re:Get The Facts

[narcberry]

Interesting since they haven't been "running on Microsoft technologies" for "the past six years"...

Re:Vietnam outperforms London

[synthespian]

Ok, so here's the tally I've seen so far:

- LSE today (7 hours downtime)
- Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange (3 days downtime)
- Brazil futures, BM & F, aug 26, 2008 and Bovespa Nov, 30th, 2007.

that I've heard of.

It's incredible! This looks systemic and widespread.

I guess it's a great marketing achievement for Microsoft.

When will people in the financial sector wake up and learn they've been duped?

Re:100 years?

[ThePhilips]

In business, generally it means that solution provider (software + hardware) bears direct responsibility for all unplanned downtimes.

If solution cannot provide such service availability, the solution provider has to be ready to cover all the damages. And it is often planned that way from day one: some downtimes are covers by the "5 nines", some are covered monetarily by solution providers.

That's why 5 nines solutions cost as much as they cost: on one side to allow providers to bring quality of solution to desired level, on another side, in case of emergency, to let them to cover some downtimes with money.

But covering seven(!) hours(!!) can be lethal to the solution provider. But again, it all depends on their support contract. Some (cheaper) 5 nines are delivered without any guarantees: they only theoretically 5 nines and provide only "best effort" service availability.

Re:Using Microsoft for a 5-nines SLA? Is that a jo

[hughk]

WTF did a moderator mark this as flamebait? The poster was right, HA is a) hard and b) expensive.

I designed some of the HA stuff many years ago for Eurex. We used OpenVMS and had two clusters (over 40Km apart) for the main and standby with the standby system also being used for development with a flick of a switch the standby cluster could take over in production. We had no SANs in those days but used Digital's Hierarchical Storage Controllers. These days it runs with SANs but the host systems still run VMS and there are now product specific clusters.

The next level down there are access points containing communications servers providing connectivity to member systems and routing to the hosts which are scattered around the globe. A member normally has connectivity to two access points. The only single point of failure for a member is where both lines come together for the last few metres into their building and some idiot digs a hole in the road.