London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "This summer, the London Stock Exchange decided to move away from its Microsoft .Net-based trading platform, TradElect. Instead, they'll be using the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system. The switch is a pretty savage indictment of the costs of a complex .Net system. The GNU/Linux-based software is also faster, and offers several other major benefits. The details provide some fascinating insights into the world of very high performance — and very expensive — enterprise systems. ... [R]ather than being just any old deal that Microsoft happened to lose, this really is something of a total rout, and in an extremely demanding and high-profile sector. Enterprise wins for GNU/Linux don't come much better than this."

Comments

Not out of context

[ameline]

How disingenuous.

While it is 2.3ms faster it is also compared to 0.4ms (vs 2.7) making it 6.75 *times* faster.

Sub ms latency in trading is a critical requirement for this application and .net on windows just wasn't up to the task.

As a performance expert, this doesn't surprise me. In my opinion, current .net implementations are fundamentally unsuited to hard RT.

Re:Unix has dominated this sector for years...

[Penguinisto]

...it's news because Microsoft bragged on .NET being in the LSE for a couple of years, pointing to it as proof that they were enterprise-ready and such.

Then at about this time last year, the TradElect system (which was the .NET bits which ran the LSE) went 'splat', taking the London Stock Exchange down with it.

The relevant info should be sitting right there in TFA.

Re:Unix has dominated this sector for years...

[QuantumRiff]

any exchange/trading house/equity firm/etc that is using Windows is insane IMHO

You mean like an exchange that was the cornerstone of MS's advertisements for 2 years? About how .NET was so scalable, it was used in the exchange, and SQL Server was so wonderful, it was used in the exchange...

Well, it was the cornerstone of advertising until the exchange had a few day long technical outtage a year or so ago.. That left people in the dark, and they had to suspend all trading for a few days.. suddenly, the ads stopped.

Re:Out of context theator

[vertinox]

SEC Proposes Ban on Allowing Stock Flash Orders (dated September 19th 2009)

Democratic Senators Charles Schumer and Ted Kaufman urged the commission to halt the practice, arguing frequent traders use technology to profit from access to information not available to retail investors.

Flash traders have direct connections to the NYSE exchange and pay large sums just for bandwidth to make sure the trades are almost real time. Goldman Sachs is a key participator in this.

That said, their trades often have no human interaction and generally are computers following trading algorithms only a block away from the exchange with a direct fiber line to the office. It would be impossible otherwise.

Some traders have been raising a stink over this, but generally the miliseconds do count.

From http://seekingalpha.com/article/150397-flash-trading-goldman-sachs-front-running-everyone-else

The maximum allowable time for a flash is 500 milliseconds, or half a second, although most of the markets flash routable orders for under 30 milliseconds.

Of course I don't know how the LSE handles flash trading or even wants it but I'm going to assume they need everything to be as real time as possible. You just don't hear the finacial firms complaining about the disparities simply because they have the money to set up the transactions their servers pretty much next to the exchange itself (if not in the same building).

Re:How fast

[Red Flayer]

As far as reliability, purportedly the LSE had a single day of problems caused by never qualified reasons.

Purportedly a single day of problems?

The exchange shut down during a high-volume trading session. That's not purported, that's fact. What's purported is the number of times HVTs observed execution delays on the LSE at other high-volume times... and that's one reason Euronext has been claiming increasing market share from LSE.