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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."
...now if only my wife would do that! /rimshot!
most of the american stock exchanges have been going down all year.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Assuming 8.5 hour trading day (0700-1530) and 250 trading days/year. Maybe a squirrel caused the problem ... ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
5 nines does not mean what you think it means.
So what happens when this happens again?
Ignore this signature. By order.
It was an ugly day of finger-pointing and near-fixes, but in the end, it just left all the financial firms standing there staring at the Exchange. Definitely was a big deal--and it seemed like a lot of volume spilled over to US markets, creating volume related issues here.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
.... a method of controlling the market.
But Patch Tuesday is tomorrow?
Get your own free personal location tracker
Looks like someone needs to brush up on their buzzwords, specifically "mission critical" and "services no longer required".
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Since when is 7 hours even close to "a whole day"? Maybe you meant "almost a whole business day"?
It's a whole trading day--and that's all that really matters when it comes to a major market.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
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.
Agreed. It's a bit of flame-bait mentioning them in the summary when the exchange is being tight-lipped about what the root-cause is (if they even know at this point.) I do a lot of .NET stuff and, like other platforms eg. Java, there's many things that could cause problems, like plain old programming bugs.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
Oh, she does... just not with you.
nudge nudge, wink wink.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Perhaps the bit you're missing is that windows isn't quite as bad as the /. crowd likes to say it is. Especially if its an older (translation: fixed & stable) variety like win2k or even nt4.
"and was designed for increased speed and system capacity"
and see - it went down far faster and more completely than the previous system would have been able to. So that's progress. It's all in how you present it.
The exchange insists the problem was connectivity, not the trading platform.
Not to sound overly cynical, but I'd hardly expect them to acknowledge the problem if it were the trading platform that was the issue. That'd kind of be business suicide.
So their 9.9999% uptime is screwed?
proud caffeine whore
Perhaps the bit you're missing is that windows isn't quite as bad as the /. crowd likes to say it is. Especially if its an older (translation: fixed & stable) variety like win2k or even nt4.
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but surely you aren't trying to compare NT4 uptime with the 5 9s of a solid System z platform?
Oh please. Persuasive marketers can get Windows installed just about anywhere including US war ships.
While it is commonly accepted by many techies (and strongly denied by others) that Microsoft Windows is not a suitable platform for that level of computing, sales people often bypass the techies who know better and sell to managers and executives who still believe "you can't get fired for using Microsoft."
With all this said, it will be quite some time (and possibly never) that we will ever know for certain what is at the root cause of the failure. You can be sure that Microsoft is all over this problem both technically and P.R.-wise. They won't let the facts get out if they are damaging. Recall the major power outage that many still believe was caused by a worm attacking Microsoft servers? As far as I can see, the true cause of that failure has yet to be revealed.
But if this was a planned event, or an unplanned disaster resulting from a planned event gone bad (updates, upgrade, other maintenance), you would think they would have provided for mishaps in some way or another.
But as this news story is all I have to go on, there is no indication of cause and so I will not presume this is a Microsoft problem. But it says a lot that NYSE runs on Linux and not Microsoft. It seems SOMEONE did listen to the techies.
After the malfunction, TradElect was immediately bought by UK's government for $200 billion and all its debts waved. In an unrelated story, medicare tax was raised yet again because of an unexpected shortfall.
.....I mean, there couldn't be any other possible cause for the problem.
Oh, she does... just not with you. nudge nudge, wink wink.
Your wife -- does she go?
More importantly, does she run?
More specifically, does she run Linux?
Ignore this signature. By order.
Perhaps the bit you're missing is that windows isn't quite as bad as the /. crowd likes to say it is. Especially if its an older (translation: fixed & stable) variety like win2k or even nt4.
A) Yes, in fact, it is quite that bad (just not as bad as when it was first released) and
B) There is no "fixed and stable" version of .NET yet. At least none I would hinge my mission critical business on.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Does anyone else remember the "The london stock exchange chose windows 2003 for reliability, they didn't choose linux" ad banners that used to run all over the place, including slashdot if i remember?
Funny how it's all come crashing down...
"The london stock exchange chose windows, but after 7 hours of downtime wishes they had chosen linux".
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
"5-nines SLA"
I had to look this up, so I imagine other people didn't know it either (I thought was was a stock exchange term). First Google search result reveals the answer,
The Battle With "3 Nines" and The Goal of "5 Nines"
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.
bollocks
That's 'bollocks', mate. You'd know 'em if you had 'em.
Sig this!
Wait! Are you suggesting that downtime can be caused by application problems, network problems, hardware problems, dumbass systems administrators and a whole slew of other things completed unrelated to the platform on which it is running?
I am *shocked*! *Shocked* I tell you!
My blog
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.
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2006/09/26/218637/city-prepares-to-test-new-trading-platform.htm
I bet the fingers are pointing today - Accenture (formerly Arthur Andersen) India vs HP vs Microsoft.
.NET garbage collector: "Oops, that wasn't garbage!"
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
Let me explain computers to you. See, the developer uses a set of platforms, languages, integration components, etc.. to deliver his functionality to the end user. A failure at any level can cause the application to fail. It could be application logic, network issues, hardware issues, integration with third party systems, a dipship systems administrator, etc...
And yet the 90-105 IQ SlashDweeb set comes out in numbers with no data and says "lolz Windoze! .NET haha!". Crikey.
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."
You've seen the first scene of "four weddings and a funeral", surely?
Was it back up before the bell rang and did the Micro$oft stock plumit? in a dutch dialect dot-net translates into "doesn't work" ;-)
Oh, she does... just not with you. nudge nudge, wink wink.
Your wife -- does she go?
More importantly, does she run?
More specifically, does she run Linux?
More relevantly, does she run TradElect?
No, she goes down on it.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Windows does suck, building any mission-critical system on a fundamentally botched foundation is begging for trouble, and knowing that TradElect was built on quicksand is prima facie evidence of negligence. IOW, it probably failed because windows sucks, not the other way around.
Let me explain computers to you
Let me explain stock exchanges to you: if they go down during a trading day, a lot of people lose a lot of money. In years past, this kind of work was typically done on Tandem, Stratus or IBM systems which were so reliable that any unscheduled reboot merited a visit from the factory.
BTW, I've worked on trading systems for Salomon Brothers, Phibro Energy, JP Morgan, and UBS/Warburg. If anyone had suggested running mission-critical back-office apps (like the system of record of a major stock exchange) on windows, they would have been laughed out of the room. I'm astounded that the LSE could be so sloppy.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well, I'm a state employee, and I can tell you that a few 7 hour days in a row would outright kill me.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
The exchange goes down at the same time that the US buys two huge, failing monoliths?
"Turn the bloody thing off! We'll just blame Microsoft and see how the rest of the markets shake out, shall we?"
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
What the hell are you smoking??!? I worked for one of the top switch/router manufacturers for 7 years and this is FAR from true in their shop and pretty much everyone else's. Talk to any technical call-center rep for the top 5 or so router manufacturers and I am sure they can tell you many horror stories...
No different then what can happen on a unix box I suppose.
Note that the current system is built around a large cluster of 2.2GHz servers, while the unix-based system it replaced (which coped perfectly happily with a substantial portion of the same traffic) ran from a smaller cluster of much slower servers.
The primary purpose for the new system, introduced less than a year ago, was to expand capacity. For it to have failed within a year due to lack of capacity basically means that it has failed in that objective.
In other words, he used the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" defense.
President of Exchange: [Randolph Duke has just collapsed with shock] Mortimer, your brother is not well. We better call an ambulance.
Mortimer Duke: Fuck him! Now, you listen to me! I want trading reopened right now. Get those brokers back in here! Turn those machines back on!
[shouts - it echoes pathetically throughout the trading hall]
Mortimer Duke: Turn those machines back on!
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Is that this is good news for most of /. readers. A lot of big corporatations are being reminded of how important it can be to not cut corners when hiring programmers and IT.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
No, he'd waggle his arse .
A fanny would be a vagina in Britain.
Come on +5 informative!
"In the past six years, there have been no production outages at the London Stock Exchange, and the new systems running on Microsoft technologies are critical to maintaining this 100 per cent reliability record."
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=200042
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
yes, but how many times did they reboot it?
Oh, ye of lesser cynicism. I also, long ago, used to believe that language features could improve software reliability. Nowadays the idea just makes me cackle -- in actuality the universe just invents better idiots.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
The article here blames it on some sort of botched upgrade.
No, actually the Windows system (10 ms per transaction) was a 13x speedup over the older system (135 ms per transaction), followed quickly by an addiditonal 50% speedup (6 ms per transaction). The Windows system was just recently updated to double performance again (3 ms per transaction), so it's now 45 times as fast as the unix-based system it replaced.
You may be able to fault it on reliability (though the olde system wasn't perfect either), but you can't fault it on performance.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You must be an American, since you have NO idea what irony is...
"It could be application logic, network issues, hardware issues, integration with third party systems, a dipship systems administrator, etc"
.Net based trading platform ..
But it wasn't any of the above. The Stock Exchange failed after a failed upgrade of the Microsoft
davecb5620@gmail.com
In other words, he used the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" defense.
Yes, he did and as a matter of fact it's a valid defense and it's not a chicken or egg problem. Almost everything that ever wants to run mission-critical systems have to work their way up from missing-trivial through mission-sensitive and mission-important. Customers didn't just one day decide IBM was overpriced and threw out all their computers, they tried and tested clones and nothing bad happened. Can you point to any smaller exchanges that use Linux? Or do you expect that suddenly Linux should go from nowhere to running the biggest, most critical markets in the world economy? No offense, but it doesn't happen to anything else either, walk before you run. That, or bribe before you run but expect some trip-ups...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Leaky abstractions (look it up, it is a good read). A lot of times for kitchen sink platforms like .Net and Java you get burned by the bugs buried in the underlying platform. If to many of these system are stacked it becomes really difficult to have any stability.
Of course it is very unlikely that MS achieves five 9s on any installation, let alone as an average.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You can talk up system z all you want, but when it comes right down to it, most of the outages problems are caused by incompetence, not hardware failure. Because of this, I've actually seen a Win2K based system beat zOS based systems a few years in a row. It frequently has little to do with the hardware, or even the OS.
"The UK's major banks and hundreds of City trading firms will begin testing the London Stock Exchange's new core trading platform early next month, ahead of its planned launch in the summer of 2007 ..
.. Tradelect .. will rely on high-speed middleware developed in-house, which was created using Microsoft's C# programming language and the .net Framework"
Accenture built the Tradelect platform in India between late 2004 and March this year
davecb5620@gmail.com
d'oh. So it was all built on .NET 1.1, no wonder. They need to upgrade to .NET 3.5 and all will be good. promise.
6.40K transactions/second ought to be enough for everyone.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Is it "Talk like an Ass-Pirate Day" already?
No, TLAP Day is next week.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Mainframes, AS/400 - pricey but high reliability with 2-3 decades of baseline.
PC's / Windows - cheap, "good enough" for home use and light business use, new as hell and subject to unknown problems- and with a known history of issues too.
I use a pc daily... but there is no way I would put any 99% uptime application on it where huge amounts of money or lives were at stake. It's fine as a client.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction you're trying to draw,
Latency versus throughput. If the new system processed those serially while the old could handle 130 in parallel, then the old system would be 10x faster even though the new was 10x quicker.
but total transaction capacity of the system increased along the same lines.
Yes, after throwing massive amounts of hardware at the problem.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
but it does have a lot to do with the development. They chucked the old, stable (but "obsolete" and slow) systems for something shiny and new. In this case, Windows and .NET 1.1 written by a consultancy with Indian developers.
I doubt reliability really factored much into it, using the newest coolest stuff came first. Possibly for marketing reasons. Remember this was 4 years ago, .NET had pretty much just come out (we ignore v1.0 which was practically a preview release), you know it couldn't have been as good as the MS marketing man said it was.
No, but I can point to the New York Stock Exchange, which uses AIX and Linux.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
7 hours? Is that all you can do? We managed a 3 day outage earlier this year at the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aCTlooFV6H0Y&refer=home
>It's called redundancy. Yes, a single router will fail. 2 at once? Likely not. 3? No.
Saw triply redundant systems fail twice in my career as a net admin.
I'm willing to bet your life on the reliability of triple redundancy.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
If she's down then who will do the dishes and laundry? How do you reboot her? Does it really take 7 hours? Don't they make drugs for that?
What.. what's a wife?
It's like a mother, but requires less therapy.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
The IBM Z/OS and AIX, Sun Solaris are at such a level that they would alert the respective companies before anything catastrophic actually happens and while systems running on a parallel sysplex backup system without any employee figuring it, IBM/Sun engineers would be fixing the issue. Ask any serious bank why they keep buying/using mainframes.
The term is "Autonomic computing" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_Computing
I would investigate the decision maker having genius idea of running a financial, time critical process on Windows 2003 and .NET platform.
If the issue turned out to be network is /. going to post a retraction article? Both the summary and the comments are pretty pathetic.
I fully appreciate they have an agenda and a cause. No problem. But for such a popular site, if they're going to throw stones they should do at least wait until the target is verified.
It's about the same thing when people say that "XP does not crash, it's faulty device drivers that crash".
If a system should be reliable, then it should be reliable, no excuses accepted. It does not matter if it's system bugs, application bugs, hardware failures or power outages, a system that pretends to achieve 99.999% availability should take all that into account.
The operating system is not at fault if the power goes down, of course, it's a sloppy engineer that designs a system without redundant power supply. But, likewise, a sloppy engineer will prefer a system that lets him configure and operate it by click-and-drag, instead of a carefully designed and tested set of procedures.
A critical system should NEVER depend on an operating system that does not have a proper batch language. That should be a compact and powerful script language, using TEXT files for configuration that can be hand edited if needed, that can be stored and archived in a version control system, so that bugs can be tracked.
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.
I love to bash windows as much as the next guy, but I don't see the connection.
Developing an application on .NET does not transfer all your responsibility to Microsoft.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
I mean, that might be what they worked on, but it's kinda pointless; what's interesting is the # of transactions per second, and that can usually be improved at the expense of individual latency. For example, databases can be configured to wait a few milliseconds to group transactions, so as to write several to disk in one single write/sync.
/rimshot!
Here you go.
Nick Illidge Financial Markets Sales Manager at Microsoft UK "We are delighted that the London Stock Exchange has selected the Windows platform to base a significant part of its business on. This is further evidence of the enterprise scalability of the Windows franchise. We see our relationship with the Exchange and Accenture as a strong partnership. The Exchange is bold in its technology vision, Accenture provides the capability to deliver this vision, and Microsoft is providing the core technology to help provide the business benefits that the Exchange is looking for."
David Lester CIO at the LSE says ... that the LSE "is the only exchange in the world not to have had a single outage in six years."
"This is all about the question, 'How are we going to take over the world?'" says Lester, "... I believe this system -- because it's fast, agile and reliable -- will help us compete better. Our current system has to go down for four hours every evening to get ready for the next day's trading," he says. "The batch processing is '80s and '90s technology. You can't run a global market with a system that has to be down for four hours."
Here's a great factoid
Before joining the Exchange in 2001, David worked for Thomson Financial and Accenture.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
here their status page.
http://www.londonstockexchange.com/en-gb/products/membershiptrading/tradingservices/Incident/LIVE
same below, but may not render properly
Incident Updates
Time Market Status Exchange Action
Client Impact
Client action
6.43pm Market Closed
The Exchange regrets the earlier interruption to trading and is conducting further investigations. It is in the process of confirming all of the steps necessary to ensure trading can commence as scheduled tomorrow.
Further updates this evening will be published on this website.
Monitor this Website.
4.49pm Market Closed Closing auction has now finished. Closing prices, where relevant, have been disseminated.
4.21pm Closing Auction
This is to inform you that due to on-going connectivity issues to resume a fair and stable market the Closing Auction will commence from 16:21 onwards. The Closing Auction will uncross as scheduled at 16:35 onwards (subject to a 30 second random period).
4.00pm Continuous trading
Standard trading schedule will be followed for the remainder of the day.
3.45pm Auction
The auction will uncross at 16:00 BST (subject to a 30 second random period) at which time continuous trading will resume.
There will be no further change to the remainder of the trading day. Therefore, the Closing Auction will commence as scheduled at 16.30 and uncross at 16:35 (subject to a 30 second random period).
From this time market maker quotes in both quote and order driven markets will be firm.
Prepare to resume trading
3.30pm Auction
The International Order Book and International Bulletin Board will NOT be available for automatic execution for the rest of today.
No closing prices will be issued in these trading segments (IOB, IOBU, ITBB and ITBU) today.
The remaining Trading Segments will remain in an auction phase. A further update will be provided.
3.11pm Auction
We will be re-enabling connectivity from 3.15pm
Connectivity will be phased and following completion all order book segments will remain in an auction phase.
Once connectivity is established orders can be entered and deleted, but no electronic execution will occur until the uncrossing and commencement of continuous trading.
2.38pm
Auction To ensure consistent connectivity we are suspending connectivity to trading for a short period from 2.45pm
Once connectivity is established orders can be entered and deleted, but no electronic execution will occur until the uncrossing and commencement of continuous trading.
During this time customers are required to reset their log on connection status to ensure legitimate connections can be established once connectivity is re-enabled
2.20pm Auction
We are continuing to establish connectivity with our customers. This process is taking longer than expected.
A further update will be provided.
Once connectivity is established orders can be entered and deleted, but no electronic execution will occur until the uncrossing and commencement of continuous trading.
1.13pm Auction
We are continuing to establish connectivity with our customers.
A further update will be provided shortly.
Once connectivity is established orders can be entered and deleted, but no electronic execution will occur until the uncrossing and commencement of continuous trading.
12.30 Auction
We are continuing to establish connectivity with our customers.
Continuous trading will re-commence at the end of the auction period. We will provide at least 15 minutes notice of when we plan to end the
IIRC, Brazil Bovespa had a small glitch last month or two.
Back in the day when Wall Street and financial markets ran on Solaris systems (AFAIK), this shit wasn't common.
Now it's probably going to become *acceptable* for stock exchanges and aviation reservation software to crash.
Apparently, there's a new generation of a-holes on the system administration markets who grew up with Windows and the Blue Screen of Death, that thinks it's acceptable for operating systems to crash, once in a while. Is it evolution?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Oh, yes.. battery backed write cache. With batteries produced by the lowest bidder. The warranty is for 3 years, and the battery lasts just that long before silently failing. When the power goes, well you really didn't need that data written to disk on your database server, did you?
We now do not allow any server to be put into production with any kind of write cache on it. Ever.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Windows is just consumer junk, and not even very good consumer junk.
Kickbacks are almost certainly at work in a deployment like this.
you had me at #!
Maybe he meant rim-job...
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Haha. Having worked for a Super-Platinum-Alpha MS partner before I'll tell you how it works:
You pay your enormous Partner fee every year. Occasionally MS will send someone out with a powerpoint presentation on a 6 month old MSDN article. If you are doing one of these projects, MS will never ever touch it, or help in any way, beyond paid support for a particular product (like anyone else can pay for). They will put an article in MSDN Magazine like "Microsoft and Fagware collaborate to make Some Awesome System". There will be a photo, with the MS rep shaking the clients hand, with your boss half cropped out. They will mention a whole bunch of MS tech that you (probably didnt) use.
Its not like they ever see a single design doc, let alone line of code. They don't do a damn thing beyond telling everyone how they are collaborating with you to build Awesome-X Plus for Important Client.
Also you get to put "Gold Partner" on your website, and MS occasionally refers clients that need someone to implement stuff.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
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?
What.. what's a wife?
WIFE: Specialized form of WIFI, indicating one of two stations engaged in a (semi-)permanent point-to-point link, the other station typically called HUSBAND. Unsecured transmission often leads to packet loss 9 months after initial association, resulting in long-term elevated QoS requirements. Roaming is usually forbidden by link protocol, although experiments with mesh networks have been reported. DOS attacks often lead to severed links, litigation and possibly material and financial damages.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
I've been the lead architect and/or senior programmer on a couple of futures and options exchange trading platforms (CBOT's Order Routing System, CBOE's CBOEdirect) and pay the bills currently by connecting firms to various electronic trading platforms. Hardly anyone uses Microsoft except for GUI/user-facing applications. The back-end stuff is almost always UNIX/Linux.
Off the top of my head, I know that all the LiffeConnect-based systems (London Financial Futures Exchange, EuroNext, Amsterdam, CBOT Metals Complex, Tokyo Futures Exchange, probably a couple of others) run on Linux (a relatively recent change from Sun boxen). NYSE now owns that codebase, and I'm pretty sure that the NYSE uses Linux and AIX on its own platform.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange's GLOBEX trading engine (running CME, CBOT non-Metals, NYMEX plus a couple smaller exchanges like Minneapolis and Kansas City) platform runs on Linux. They migrated from Solaris to Red Hat back in 2004.
The Intercontinental Exchange's WebICE platform is written in Java and I believe it's running on Linux, but there may be some Solaris still around.
The CBOEdirect system is Java but runs mostly on Sun Enterprise hardware. There is some Linux in the mix, and they certainly use it on some of their other trading systems.
In the (futures and options) trading world, running on Windows servers is considered to be a sure sign of being bush-league. Demand for UNIX/Linux is huge. And I'm not saying this as a Java/UNIX/Linux snob - most of the systems I've written were Microsoft-based (for a variety of reasons - most started out as technology demonstrations that grew way beyond their intended lifespan - "the client's always right").
"you can't get fired for using Microsoft."
Maybe not but you sure can get fired when your system epic fails and stops trading for a day.
Seriously though given the length of the downtime, I doubt this was caused by an operating system problem. If that were the case, you'd just reboot the affected system and hope it doesn't go down again before you can get a patch, no? Even Vista doesn't take that long to boot.
Bah, my YTD uptime for most of my systems is 99.995 without clustering running Windows 2003. We are a java shop not a .net shop though but java isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Based on this description, seems to me that "arbitrage" is a nice word for inserting yourself into a trade which has nothing to do with you for the purpose of bleeding both the seller and the buyer out of some profit without producing or contributing anything of value. Making it more difficult would make the actual productive parties in the trade better off, and likely help economy as a whole.
Or, to put it even more bluntly: arbitrage, as described by you, is a nicer name for parasitism.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
See my journal, I write things there
I work in London as a freelancer in IT in Investment Banking. My professional experience was mostly with IT Products/Services companies.
Although I haven't worked in the LSE, from the places I've worked in around here I came out with the impression that most people in IT in this industry are amateurs (and that includes those in other geographical locations).
Any kind of more advanced IT concepts such as technical analysis, software/hardware architecture, iterative software development processes are pretty much either not done or done by people you don't have clue about what they're doing.
I'm hardly surprised with what happened in the LSE.
A trading system without the control of the source code? Are they mad or insane?
Why modded troll? It is possible to get high uptime figures with a lone system. You can't take it offline, but hell, I could probably run my PC for a year end to end without issue. The problem occurs when I try to scale that and make, say, 200 PCs all run for a whole year without issue.
It is not inserting into a trade, it is creating a trade when a difference in value is noticed. Arbitrage levels out prices between different exchanges, allowing people to trade on either without worrying if they would be getting a better price elsewhere. It is parasitic in the same sense that the oil pump is parasitic in a car - it doesn't add any power, but things turn much more freely with it in place, and it exacts a charge for doing so. Essentially, an arbitrageur is constantly shopping around for bargains an evening them out, meaning that ordinary traders don't need to do so.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Um, if you set up a network with this fiber, it would no longer be dark. I'm not sure what you think dark fiber is, fiber optics that are cool, edgy and a little bit menacing I suppose.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I have a feeling that the 'normal' IT situation was to blame for this.
Preamble: Technical Expertise provided a wonderful architecture that was HA and robust, fast, and scalable.
Bean Counters looked at the cost and said "You Tech guys spend too much money."
IT architects: "How much is your data worth?"
Bean Counters: "Not this much. Look we don't really need all of these systems. My home system has been working for 4 years with no problems. And I've talked with Microsoft Execs and they will cut us a deal for their platform. Now go away, I've just decided how the architecture will be done. Why did we hire you anyways?"
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
You need to see this particular Dilbert cartoon, which is very much like what you describe :)
http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2008-09-09/
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
one more blackhearted sentiment from a seasoned IT guy. Microsoft has no business stating "five nines" of anything other than profit. not since Xenix.
the last fortune 500 i worked for had to have the exchange cluster failed over at least twice a month, each failover costing in the neighborhood of 15 minutes (if it worked, which half the time it didnt.)
the sharepoint server cluster routinely, with all the grace of a candelabra about the skull, would try to failover and fence but managed to fence more active nodes than dead ones. brings new meaning to STONITH.
im sure Red Hat is having a good laugh over this NYSE mess.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Um, wrong - Ever heard of the Mono Project?
Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix.
http://www.mono-project.com/
Glad you fell for Microsoft's marketing campaign. There is a reason they don't crush mono. It gives a illusion that there is choice. Name me
No, arbitrage is a necessary component of orderly markets. A perfectly balanced market has 0 arbitrage opportunity.
Example: ETF Conversion/Redemption. The ETF is priced in real-time based on the price of its components. Fast systems are able to detect small discrepancies in the price of some of the components and the basket as a whole and are able to execute trades ( say BUY ) on the components and the contra trade ( SELL ) on the ETF and then redeem the ETF from the components to pair off the contra trade.
This arbitrage always works to keep the components perfectly in line with the ETF itself. I think that is a good thing.
MOST of your systems, that says it all. If you design a system you must be a little bit more certain then that "most" of it will be up for the availability your are promising.
I got a consumer HD that so far lasted for 6 years, non-stop. By your logic therefor consumer HD's are fine for a server enviroment because they last for 6 years running 24/7.
If 100% of you systems run 99.999 availabibilty, THEN you can come back. The acceptable error-rate is 0.001% FOR ALL YOUR SYSTEMS. Lets say that you have 10 2003 systems and MOST is 9, then you only got 90% availabilty, you fail, back to the drawing board.
It is hard to get true HA. MS can't do it, doesn't mean you can't use it for little projects. I have seen many a succesfull project launch on PC's thrown together at a local computer store and shoved into a rack. Worked fine, but only an idiot would guarantee any availability on it. Prove me wrong, put in your contracts that you guarantee HA for your clients. See you how your boss/lawyer reacts.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I watched NBC and ABC national TV news last night and so absolutely no coverage of this event. There was even a mention of markets around the world with the news of Freddie and Fanny government backing. Anyone else notice this? This was a major event that went unnoticed for a good portion of the US.