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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."
Now how about my desktop?
Might I suggest teak? I suppose you could go with faux finished MDF if you are on a budget, but teak is beautiful and will last forever. Then if you have any money left over, nothing says "I have arrived" like a porcelain fountain.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I guess this would be a bad topic to bring up at a Windows7 launch party.
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
Because it's Slashdot, silly.
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?
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.
Ian Ameline
...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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
You are incorrect, they are trading a $65 million dollar piece of software for a $30 million COMPANY. They bought the MilleniumIT company that had ALREADY IMPLEMENTED a trading platform. They bought the company for the platform, and now they control the development of the platform going forward in house. They are not trading one IT consultancy for another, as they now OWN the software and the company that built it.
However, they state the platform they bought ALREADY achieves 6 times the performance of the piece of software built by accenture (.4ms vs 2.7ms transaction times).
While I agree that this is more of an indictment of Accenture's apparently shoddy work than of .NET itself, the fact that they've had 6 years (the article states the TradElect software/project was started in 2003) and $65 million dollars thrown at the problem and haven't been able to make the software perform better does raise some eyebrows about the underlying technology as well.
Strictly speaking, it isn't. However, back before they made the change, the deployment of the app was supposed to be a ringing endorsement of the platform. It was one of the most prominent "get the facts" cases. So, although the relationship between the quality of the app and the quality of the platform isn't obvious in either direction, there is certain symmetry here. If the app's success was going to be an endorsement, and was hyped as such, its failure can plausibly be considered an indictment.
Actually, in retrospect, I supposed they *are* being truthful there..
It says 100% reliable on high-volume trading days... so any day where it doesn't work won't be a high-volume day (because it doesn't work, there won't *be* any volume)
In other words, this is marketspeak for the redundant phrase "when it doesn't work, you won't be able to use it".
Wait, Microsoft + Accenture built a piss-poor platform. As you may recall, Accenture is a giant in the consulting business. Their combined efforts failed miserably.
Linux is the OS of most large trading systems. This has been covered on slashdot before.
MilleniumIT has a proven product in deployment in several exchanges. Their product is not pie-in-the-sky. It works. They've had several big wins in the past decade. They've been collaborating with Intel on optimizing their platform. Their transaction processing times are an order of magnitude better than LSE's current system.
So, I'm not sure what your angle is... are you trolling? Astroturfing? Or just spouting knee-jerk reactionism without any kind of basis in reality? A quick googling might have helped you out a bit.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Typical PHB and incompetent/ expensive consulting services debacle. See below for an older ComputerWorld blog entry.
_______________________________________
July 1, 2009
.NET
programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global
consulting firm. On the back-end, it relied on Microsoft SQL Server
2000. Its goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times,
real-time system speeds, for stock trades.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows 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 (London Stock Exchange)'s Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day. While the LSE denied that the collapse was TradElect's fault, they also refused to explain what the problem really wa. Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect.
Since then, the CEO that brought TradElect to the LSE, Clara Furse, has left without saying why she was leaving. Sources in the City-London's equivalent of New York City's Wall Street--tell me that TradElect's failure was the final straw for her tenure. The new CEO, Xavier Rolet, is reported to have immediately decided to put an end to TradElect.
TradElect runs on HP ProLiant servers running, in turn, Windows Server 2003. The TradElect software itself is a custom blend of C# and
It never, ever came close to achieving these performance goals. Worse still, the LSE's competition, such as its main rival Chi-X with its MarketPrizm trading platform software, was able to deliver that level of performance and in general it was running rings about TradElect. Three guesses what MarketPrizm runs on and the first two don't count. The answer is Linux.
It's not often that you see a major company dump its infrastructure software the way the LSE is about to do. But, then, it's not often you see enterprise software fail quite so badly and publicly as was the case with the LSE. I can only wonder how many other Windows enterprise software failures are kept hidden away within IT departments by companies unwilling to reveal just how foolish their decisions to rely on archaic, cranky Windows software solutions have proven to be.
I'm sure the LSE management couldn't tell Linux from Windows without a techie at hand. They can tell, however, when their business comes to a complete stop in front of the entire world.
So, might I suggest to the LSE that they consider Linux as the foundation for their next stock software infrastructure? After all, besides working well for Chi-X, Linux seems to be doing quite nicely for the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), etc., etc.
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SEC Proposes Ban on Allowing Stock Flash Orders (dated September 19th 2009)
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
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).
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The TradElect system was originally developed by Microsoft and Accenture so it was to be a showcase of how excellent .NET was.
Unfortunately, other companies showed how good their stuff was for this kind of work, and MS showed that you cannot polish a turd.
(well, ok, .NET would have created a system that would run your line-of-business apps without problem, but when it comes to very high performance, low latency systems, its simply not suitable, a bit like Java is not suitable for nuclear reactors).
The new system will be written entirely in a lower level language, and MilleniumIT does use C++ - take a look at their jobs board and you'll see the only skill referenced is C++.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that a GC-based, VM-based language that has layers of intermediate execution is going to be slower than is required for a trading system. What I don;t get is that MS thought they could throw hardware at it until it worked. Don't forget that MilleniumIT also was bought for $30m which is roughly half what the .NET system cost (£40m).
The moral is that you don't want to use the simple-to-code MS platform when you can get a best-of-breed system, based on Linux and good engineering for a lot less. IT managers around the world should be looking at this and thinking what similar lessons their IT departments could learn.
The article was clear that they were not dumping .Net just because it was .Net, but dumping the application and system that just happened to use .Net. They also dumped the out-source model and actually bought the company that makes the new product so that they would have more in-house control. The .Net thing is just a minor quibble in the big story.
The languages are merely tools; the bigger picture is about the application and the customers. The problem with Microsoft's approach to being a "solutions provider" is that they're too focused on pushing their tools and technology, with the actual application being an afterthought. That is, they're Microsoft focused, not customer focused.
At the end of the day, the London Stock Exchange could not care less what the developers think about the language they're using, or even what the operating system is. They're not trying to stick a finger in the eye of Microsoft or promote open source, they just want a product that does what they want at the best price they can get.