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.

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: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:Get The Facts

[narcberry]

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

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.