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London Stock Exchange To Abandon Windows
BBCWatcher writes "Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that the London Stock Exchange is abandoning its Microsoft Windows-based trading platform: 'Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE's Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day .... Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect ...'"
...Huzzah!
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It's not Windows vs Linux.
It's TradElect vs MarketPrizm, which happen to run on Windows vs Linux respectively.
TradElect never managed its performance promises, which suggests lies from marketing and / or programmers unable to deliver what they were asked to. Despite what the Linux fanboys love to say, inferior software isn't Windows-only, and does exist on Linux too.
This could easily have been the other way around, ditching Linux and a shit piece of trades software for Windows and a good bit of trades software. The OS is irrelevant here, except to fanboys of either side.
I'm in the industry, so I have a little more background on this. They spent about 40M GBP building the system, and it's only been used for two years. It was (entirely?) outsourced to Accenture. Other reasons why the system sucks: It can only handle about 10,000 orders/second, and has latency numbers that are incredibly high (5 milliseconds+).
Looking at other exchanges, there are trading platforms that have been able to last 10+ years while scaling quite well.
TradElect was/is a project management and technical disaster.
Did the project. They needed a dedicated response time in the 1/100th second range and used a combination of Windows, SQL Server and .Net!
The project was doomed from day 0!
The article is at fault here, Windows alone is not at fault it is the entire stack beginning from the OS up to the implementation language which is at fault!
NYSE and OMX both run Linux based systems. I trade on OMX Stockholm and there is a lot of hickups. I've heard a lot of bad things about NYSE too.
They're abandoning TradElect and the platform it happened to be on. The OS is really a background to all of this. The primary cause of the switch has more to do with TradElect sucking than anything else. Having worked on the tech side of the finance industry, I am not at all surprised. They have some of the worst programmers in the world. Standard software methodology is rarely embraced. Unit tests? Code review? What's that? At the hedge fund where I worked, basically any time a developer left someone either had to pick up the pieces of crap he wrote or start over. Almost everyone choose the latter. I remember one morning one of the applications stopped working and we realized it's because we retired an old DB server and moved it to a new host. I asked the developer to just point it to the new host. They couldn't because the dumbasses had hard coded the hostname! They couldn't change it without a recompile! This was at one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, at the time at least. The problem was that none of the partners knew anything about software development so they didn't know if the CTO they hired was any good. They went by stupid things like names of the school he was from and names of his previous employers. His previous employers probably did the same. Software development in finance is a giant circle jerk.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
...is just the WRONG platform for this. Stock Exchange, like many transaction based business, needs real time systems and Windows 2003 plus SQL as far I know don't make a RT platform.
Yeah I read those too ;) So windows issue or not, it is a Microsoft problem :
to wit; page 4:
"In the development, roll-out, and implementation processes, Microsoft worked closely with the London Stock Exchange to ensure not only that they understood their immediate requirements, but that the solution fitted their long-term business plans as specified in the TRM project."
and
"Robin Paine, Chief Technical Officer at the Exchange, says: âoeThe London Stock Exchange was looking for a responsive partner to engage across all phases of the Technology Roadmap programme. The collaborative approach Microsoft offered made it an ideal choice."
Any more questions on whether Microsoft was "really" involved? Then go do your own research -- there never was any doubt.
I don’t know if Accenture sucks, but Microsoft itself was involved in first person in the development of the project (they were proud to announce this until now).
The fact that not even Microsoft’s involvement was able to make the system meet its requirements looks *very* indicative to me.
I worked on trading systems at the CBOE for a couple of years and one thing I can say for sure is that the only Microsoft systems there are the front-ends for the traders who insist on Windows. All the back-ends, where the real activity takes place, everything is Linux. So, only the trader GUIs are Windows, and everything else is Linux running on x86 blades - racks and racks of them. We never got a virus or trojan on the trading systems, but we were scrubbing viruses and other malware off the traders' front-ends all the time. Anyway, when I read about the LSE going with a Microsoft solution for their trading infrastructure, I could only shake my head and say "Remember Denver International Airport!"...
"Looking at other exchanges, there are trading platforms that have been able to last 10+ years while scaling quite well." - by Jerky McNaughty (1391) on Friday July 03, @09:40AM (#28571007)
NASDAQ is an example of this, & yes: NASDAQ has maintained the "fabled '5-9's" of 99.999% uptime on Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005 (in failover clusters) since late 2005, acting as the official dissemination system of official trade data:
----
NASDAQ Migrates to SQL Server 2005:
http://windowsfs.com/enews/nasdaq-migrates-to-sql-server-2005
&/or
NASDAQ Uses SQL Server 2005 - Reducing Costs through Better Data Management:
http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2007/09/17/sqlauthority-news-nasdaq-uses-sql-server-2005-reducing-costs-through-better-data-management/
"NASDAQ, the worlds first electronic stock market replaced its aging mainframe computers with Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 on two 4-node clusters to support its Market Data Dissemination System (MDDS). Every trade processed in the NASDAQ marketplace goes through the system with Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 handling some 5,000 transactions per second at market open. The system also responds to about 10,000 queries a day and is able to handle real-time queries against data without slowing the database down."
+
Case Studies - Financial Services:
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/cs-financial-roi.aspx?pf=true [microsoft.com] [microsoft.com] [microsoft.com] [microsoft.com]
"NASDAQ Deploys SQL Server 2005 to Support Real-Time Trade Booking and Queries
NASDAQ, which became the worlds first electronic stock market in 1971, and remains the largest U.S. electronic stock market, is constantly looking for more-efficient ways to serve its members. As the organization prepared to retire its aging large mainframe computers, it deployed Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 on two 4-node clusters to support its Market Data Dissemination System (MDDS). Every trade that is processed in the NASDAQ marketplace goes through the MDDS system, with SQL Server 2005 handling some 5,000 transactions per second at market open. SQL Server 2005 simultaneously handles about 100,000 queries a day, using SQL Server 2005 Snapshot Isolation to support real-time queries against the data without slowing the database. NASDAQ is enjoying a lower total cost of ownership compared to the large mainframe computer system that the SQL Server 2005 deployment has replaced."
----
NOW - the actual PROOF of that "stability/uptime":
http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=MarketShare
"NASDAQ is renowned for its high performance technology and has proven reliability with 99.999+% uptime. Whats more, firms count on NASDAQ for unsurpassed speed and tested capacity to execute trades quickly and efficiently."
----
AND, "There ya are"... Evidence of the possible stability, security, & speed on Windows, in a high tpm environs, keeping stable & running F A S T 24x7 for 1/2 a decade++ going strong, acting as the official trade data dissemination system for NASDAQ!
APK
P.S.=? Personally, & especially based on the evidences here (the thread topic itself, & the NASDAQ data I just provided here)? Well - I think a great deal of stability & uptime has to do a LOT with the skills of those architecting a system, first, AND later those that have the task of maintaining it also (this means the network engineering staff AND coding teams around said projects), as well as their personal work-ethics - not so much on the Opera
I never understood why Microsoft made a specific server for stock exchanges anyways. It sure does e-mail great though.
Mere facts backed up by references are nothing compared to what you want to believe - silence him!
I'm a bit confused as to why it's Microsoft getting knocked on the head here. Sure, SQL Server 2000 might not be the best choice, but how are we to know what actually caused the issues? You could write poorly written code anywhere, and outages could well be caused by hardware failure and poor failover planning. To blame it all on the .NET framework seems a bit odd to me, without knowing what was causing all the problems.
Of course, I'm not a big fan of SQL Server databases for huge mission-critical applications (multi-version consistency in TempDB version stores, anyone?).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Welcome our smug, bearded, Unix liking overloads.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
If I recall correctly, the TradElect platform was pushed by MS as a showcase for its new .NET 1.0 platform, and was written by a whole team (or two) of outsourced developers in this brand new, shiny technology. They ported it to .NET 1.1 but I'm not sure they ever tried to port it to .NET 2.0.
Did I mention it was developed in conjunction with Accenture? Oh, and it was developed by Microsoft itself by all the news reports (though I bet the development was done by cheapest devs Accenture could hire, with a few MS consultants discussing architecture and collecting big fees - it didn't cost $40m in hardware alone!)
So, yes, it could have been poorly written code, but as you say, you can write poor .NET code. It always seemed to me that the project was akin to an 'enterprise java' one of yesteryear - big, slow, over-engineered, poorly developed, resource intensive and generally 'too big to fail'. Seems also that the LSE knows better than to hang on to the worst kind of crappy software and try to make it better.
As for MS bashing, they're the big boy, so they always take the hit. If all software written for MS was great and worked perfectly, we'd worship them as gods. As it is, we continually see problems and give them no slack. If they were a small company trying hard to make a difference, we'd be more forgiving.
In the development, roll-out, and implementation processes, Microsoft worked closely with the London Stock Exchange
davecb5620@gmail.com
I was involved in discussions (and more) with the LSE before (during but not so much) and after they decided to select Microsoft / Accenture / India / Outsourcing as the path for their solution and I know some of the key decision makers. Under the Microsoft umbrella, they were significantly influenced by the resources Microsoft was willing to commit to making the project work despite the newness of .NET as an ifrastructure.
It is important to remember where the LSE was before the TradeElect project, they had completely outsourced their platform to Accenture, the amount they spent per annum on keeping that platform up and running were phenomenal, an order of magnitude more than some of our clients were spending and they (our clients) were running much higher performance systems. TradeElect was designed to decrease these costs without compromising the "I don't lose sleep at night worryin about the systems" position of senior managers. I firmly believed it was a mistake to believe that .NET at the heart of the platform would meet the requirements of an exchange trading platform.
I have no real issue with Windows as the OS under the platform, really for a trading system the OS is providing a TCP stack and some IPC and thats about it. Everything else and the vast majority of the bottlenecks are in your application stack, whether it be tools or application code you are writing for your specific problem domain. Although one might argue that the Microsoft IPC tools can be argued as "weak/complicated".
It will be interesting to see which people the LSE use to provide the analysis of which way to jump with this decision. Too many very senior folk were involved all the way through the TradeElect project for heads to roll, but it will be interesting to watch who says what when the final decision of what to do is announced.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
MS used to run lots of ads, including banner ads on slashdot, about how the london stock exchange chose windows over linux... Those ads stopped very quickly when they had the big outage a few months ago.
Several European banks had their asses handed back to them, too, last spring for trying to shove their Windows-uberalles ideology into their core activities. For several months it was (maybe still is) practically impossible to do basic banking. People could go into others accounts, money from their own accounts could not be transfered, money could not be paid into their accounts. It was a hardship for many small businesses that were stupid enough to put their business accounts at a bank where ideology trumps technology. When your own customers can't pay you, money becomes a problem. There, too, the problem lay squarely on the attempt to use MS .NET instead of something workable. It's just a half-assed copy of Java locked into one vendor. After the banks getting bad press for weeks, there was a vague statement made about the company that takes care of the network, but not tying that statement to the ongoing outages.
It's not important to laugh at MS for making crap products, it's important to not use them. The problem with MS products has been around as long as the company itself so it's not like so-called technical 'experts' can claim ignorance or any other excuse. Adding the phrase "with a computer" doesn't absolve criminal negligence for recommending MS products.
Technology might be a matter of choice, but as the late US Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, has said, the right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. So, that choice does not include the right to screw things up beyond belief for everyone else. It's not a nameless or faceless "terrorist" group that is costing our businesses, shutting down our infrastructure, tangling our air traffic control, our power grid, our hospitals, or stock exchanges and banks. The people promoting Windows and Microsoft technologies have real names and faces and walk among us every day. Take them out and we've won the first round. Why is the military sitting on its hands here? The damage is easy to add up and it's even easier to remove the cause. A side benefit from the cleanup would be a restoration of the freemarket and the usual subsequent boom of economic activity.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
...Airbus's belief that humans cannot react as quickly to dangerous situations as computers and Boeing's belief that computers cannot make judgments as well as humans in dangerous situations.
I used to work for Boeing. Boeing's IT department is a huge fan of Microsoft products (Possibly due to the proximity. Boeing Commercial HQ is just a chair's throw away from Microsoft). Engineering's decision to provide pilots absolute authority over autopilot functions stems in part from their experience in dealing with Microsoft office systems.
Switzerland scenario != Airbus scenario
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.