NYSE Moves to Linux

blitzkrieg3 writes "The New York Times is reporting on how the NYSE group now feels that Linux is 'mature enough' for the New York Stock Exchange. They are using commodity x86 based Hewlett-Packard hardware and Linux in place of their traditional UNIX machines. From NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow: 'We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix. No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX, and we feel the same way to some extent about Solaris. Other reasons cited for the switch were increased flexibility and lower cost.'"

Yes, but does it run...

[by Anonymous Coward]

...I one-upped the people that skip reading article summaries and skipped reading the title.

His final comment

[by Anonymous Coward]

"If there's one thing the market hates, it's crashes."

no fooling.

[Ungrounded Lightning (62228)]

"If there's one thing the market hates, it's crashes."

No fooling.

I used to work on Amdhall's unix for their mainframes. Among other things it was used by brokerages to support trading and all the Baby Bells to support data collection for billing.

If a baby bell's billing system went down all the phone calls dialed, started, or completed while it was down were free. This made downtime cost something like $4 million / hour.

Brokerage support going down cost far more.

So imagine a trading system going down (equivalent to all the brokerages going down at the same time...)

Needless to say, much of the point of mainframes is to keep this from ever happening.

So the hardware is built so it performs the correct computation despite component failures, radiation-flipped bits, or on-the-fly hardware changes (adding/deleting/resizing peripherals, CPUs memory, switching out failing components), etc. And the software is built to similar standards.

This can cause problems. Like sizing event counters to stand uptime measured in decades. Or getting non-critical patches installed. (I recall a minor patch to a driver, too small to rate forcing a couple million bux worth of reboot, that had been installed on all the customers' machines to go live at the next reboot. Two years later (last I heard) they were still supporting the bug because some systems hadn't rebooted yet...)

Re:

[the eric conspiracy (20178)]

If a baby bell's billing system went down all the phone calls dialed, started, or completed while it was down were free.

I call bullshit. Telco switches record the calls to CDR (call data records) files before sending the data on to the billing systems. If the billing system goes down no big whoop, the files are processed the next day.

Now there are some cases when calls could get lost - but those are due to emergency traffic through the switch during overload conditions having a higher process priority than

distributed systems

[darkuncle (4925)]

the answer to five 9s uptime is to stop building systems that rely on single points of failure. Compare Google's approach to processing and uptime to that of the mainframe era. Totally different infrastructures with similar goals and globally, similar uptimes/reliabilities. Design your systems such that any component (any switch, router, power supply, hard drive, server ... to a certain degree, even any individual data center) can fail without resulting in a loss of data. Sure, it's complicated - but it can

Inevitability, Mr. Anderson.

[headkase (533448)]

Linux this, KDE that, Wikipedia here... What all of Free has in common is "Openness" - imagine twenty years from now: I believe that more and more content will move towards a modern variation of the "stone soup" parable until its the defacto standard. Openness allows the rapid creation and innovation of practically anything under the sun. And that pool only gets larger everyday. The only thing that can stop it is if government explicity steps in and makes giving away your effort illegal - other than that it is simply inevitable, give or take twenty years - that Openness will be the primary regulating force for all manner of content.

Openness, schmopenness

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

"It's the smell ... don't you agree, Mr. Anderson?"

NASDAQ hasn't changed

[compumike (454538)]

The NASDAQ exchange, which has always focused more on technology, is totally a Microsoft fanboy. Maybe that's because MSFT is the largest stock on the NASDAQ exchange.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]

Re:

[djrok212 (801670)]

Unfortunately you are absolutely WRONG. Nasdaq's trading system currently runs on about 100 systems from Rackable Systems running LINUX. They inherited this technology from their purchase of INET ATS (formerly Island ECN) which had been running on Linux for many years (since about 2002 when it migrated to Linux from DOS, yes I said DOS) And unlike the post above where they supposed NYSE has a customized built directly supported by HP, the INET ATS OS, ran in different forms based on both Redhat Fedora and

Re:

[harlows_monkeys (106428)]

There seems to be some MS there, at least according to their VP of engineering according to their VP of engineering [computerworld.com]:

Nasdaq replaced aging Tandem mainframes used to disseminate market trade data with a SQL Server 2005 system that handles 5,000 transactions per second and 100,000 queries a day and can scale up to 8 million new rows of data per day, according to Ken Richmond, vice president of engineering for the stock exchange. Richmond praised the integration of the latest editions of Visual Studio and SQL

"Proprietary UNIX"?

[upnarms (766320)]

I never thought I'd see these two words together. UNIX [unix.org] is what happens when you meet a set of interfaces [unix.org] defined by a standards body known as The Open Group [opengroup.org].

I bet we won't be seeing this story in....

[Tracy Reed (3563)]

...the latest issue of the "Highly Reliable Times".

Linux uptime.

[gandhi_2 (1108023)]

Well Guys...

For what it's worth:

When I went to Iraq, I had a laptop running ubuntu. I setup apache2, php5, and mysql5. We created our own "series of tubes" in our barracks area and I supplied our own intranet website (read: porn server). Oh, and America's Army server.

This thing ran for several months at a time without a reboot. The only reboots were due to other problems, like when a stray 7.62mm bullet knocked out our generator one time, but as for linux running...this thing ran like a champ. In 11 months of service, it never had a problem.

Of course, it wasn't under the same kind of load. But my NIC was usually maxed out for 40% of the day.

For consumer-grade hardware with free and open software, 0% downtime not energy related, I feel that Linux did a fine job. Seriously, 11 months, 3 reboots due to power. Nice.

Re:

[theurge14 (820596)]

"The only reboots were due to other problems, like when a stray 7.62mm bullet knocked out our generator one time, but as for linux running...this thing ran like a champ."

But you can't say it was bulletproof.

Re:Linux uptime.

[risk one (1013529)]

Wait a sec. You fought in Iraq, and while there, during your time off, you played America's Army? Holy crap.

Or are all AA servers located in Iraq, for added realism?

maybe headline should have been

[rubycodez (864176)]

NYSE moves to Nonstop on Itanium2, and oh yeah also some GNU/Linux x86 servers on the side. Time will tell if Nonstop is as good on Itanium as it was on MIPS.

Re:Reliability

[Colin Smith (2679)]

I work in Healthcare IT, and as much as I like Linux, it is my experience that Linux is not yet reliable for mission critical stuff.

Might be more to do with you or your I.T. staff than Linux. 5 nines Linux systems have been around for years.
 

Re:

[zx-15 (926808)]

It's just a pity that Oracle doesn't think so.

Re:Reliability

[rubycodez (864176)]

so you work with systems that are either poorly maintained or run buggy software. Having worked with all the major flavors of Unix over almost twenty years, I've found the major GNU/Linux distros can be just as reliable. And I've encountered the occasional core-dumping bugs in HPUX, Solaris, AIX that were show stoppers (read patch lists for any of them, *someone* had to be a victim of the bad oopses.) Windows is a desktop system that's been stretched into something it had no business attempting, though maybe server 2003 is good enough for enterprise use.

Re:Reliability

[teebob21 (947095)]

You, sir, have hit the nail on the head. These days, its all about the software on a UNIX-derived OS. Windows is all about just keeping the machine off of life support. I work for a company that uses nearly as many flavors of OS as Kobe Bryant has had sex partners. Oh yeah, sports reference, and this is /. I mean, ...as many OS's as major Slackware releases. (Better?)

Our digital video controllers run SUSE, our network connectivity monitors are Debian-based, our workstations throughout the company are a mix of Windows 2000, XP Pro, and Vista. Heck, our billing software runs on a Tandem [wikipedia.org]! The project I work on is a collaborative mix of the Tandem billing system, a Unix-derived OS middleware, the Solaris cluster application server, and Windows clients. It's a veritable OS soup. Thankfully, on the software side, it's all developed and supported by a 3rd party vendor. Yet through it all, our biggest headache is the Windows clients with their general operating system mishaps. They die unexpectedly, corrupting the MBR. The application suffers from a DLL error that comes and goes with different revisions of the software, etc. The Tandem and middleware have never gone down, and the Solaris cluster has a required program which springs a memory leak requiring a process restart every 30 days or so. That's all. If we could get a way to put our project into the field on a Linux-based platform, my job would consist of reading Slashdot and answering "how-do-I?" emails, not the current daily firefighting.

Re:Reliability

[cyclone96 (129449)]

it is my experience that Linux is not yet reliable for mission critical stuff

I work for NASA (who coined the term "mission critical") and we think it's ready. The IBM A31p laptops onboard the Space Station were recently switched to Redhat. These are the laptops that command to the core computer system and control the vehicle, not just some random payload.

Mission Control in Houston is in the process of switching to RHEL based systems, and should be complete sometime next year.

Re:Reliability

[alshithead (981606)]

"In Windows, I had to reboot on almost a weekly basis at least..."

Just anecdotal experience but the Windows 2000 and 2003 boxes I've administered have been rock solid other than the occasional box which was running a flaky application. It never surprised me to see a random blue screen with Windows NT boxes but a blue screen on a 2000 or 2003 server was always a surprise. Having said that, I'm not sorry at all to see a major, high visibility implementation of Linux. I hope they have much success.

Re:

[alshithead (981606)]

"Oh just go away with the no more BSOD's on windows XP ec. bullshit. Yeah, like random reboots are all that much better. Yes, we all know, there is now a windows service that initiates at boot and monitors the system for a crash that would initiate a BSOD, so instead this service reboots the system, like really fucking cool and useful that, a genuine marketdroid M$=B$ exercise in marketing (same number of crashes you only choose whether you BSOD by disabling the service or random reboot)."

Wow, who pissed in

Re:Not the same as a Desktop

[by Anonymous Coward]

Why, what's your stake? So people use desktop Linux at home. I do. Doesn't that make you mad? I love that. My wife runs Linux on her computer, too. My kids do, too. Does that piss you off? I'm glad. Lots of the people I work with use Linux on a home desktop, too. Linux is better than Microsoft in every way. Doesn't that just whip you into a foaming mad frenzy? Lots and lots of people use Linux every day, and they're smug and happy and laughing at you. Are you busting a blood vessel yet? I sure hope so.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

I love the internet. Only there can what is probably a perfectly reasonable man come off as a flaming dickwad. Or, what is probably a flaming dickwad can pretend he was a wife and kids.

Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[reporter (666905)]

Although Linux is free, the NYSE did not simply download Linux and install it on some Hewlett-Packard (HP) hardware purchased through Costco. The NYSE purchased a packaged solution from HP (or another solutions bundler like Accenture), and HP will guarantee that this installation of Linux will be reliable to 6 sigma. The contract between the NYSE and HP will likely include some sort of guaranteed uptime.

If Linux has a bug that diminishes uptime at the NYSE and if the Linux "team" of volunteer programmers does not offer a fix within 24 hours, then HP management will order its commercial slave programmers to develop a solution -- pronto.

If a you or I encountered a bug in our Linux downloaded from the Web for free, we would have no immediate remedy to our problem. We must wait for the next release, which could take weeks.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[Chris Mattern (191822)]

If a you or I encountered a bug in our Linux downloaded from the Web for free, we would have no immediate remedy to our problem. We must wait for the next release, which could take weeks.

And this is different from other OSes the average person can buy...how, exactly?

Chris Mattern

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[cyranoVR (518628)]

And this is different from other OSes the average person can buy...how, exactly?

It could take...months?

Re:

[timeOday (582209)]

Maybe he's saying it's no better (nor worse) than Solaris with an uber-expensive support license? I don't know.

Re:

[NNKK (218503)]

Or you might just have to go look online for a patch or new package that a community member created. Or if you have the requisite skillset, you might even be able to fix it yourself.

This is one of the advantages to FOSS. Yes, you might end up having to wait for the next release like any other package (or you might just prefer to wait, if you lack time or the bug isn't severe enough to motivate you), but you might have other options/choices.

You forgot an option.

[palegray.net (1195047)]

Sure, those options work, but I think you overlooked one of the most obvious solutions. If you're running a business that depends on a Linux-based solution, and you encounter a bug that seriously degrades your platform's stability, you always have the option of hiring a programmer to develop a patch.

Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (as in beer)

[Vellmont (569020)]

Very few businesses really care much about the sticker price of an operating system. What many businesses are catching on to is that Linux has little to no vendor lock-in. It goes something like this:

Develop all your software and systems on one Linux. Then find out you don't like HP? Fine.. take your business to Dell. The distribution they're running on starts to suck rocks? No problem, switch to RHEL. RHEL starts to not meet your needs? Customize your own distribution.

Not being tying your business to the whims of whatever company you're dealing with is truly powerful. If you ask me, that's the real power of Linux, and open source software. Linux makes operating systems into a true commodity like grain, where switching to another vendor is low cost.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (as in bee

[TubeSteak (669689)]

Psssst... The NYSE has been running on an IBM mainframe for quite sometime now.

They had a choice of moving from a 1,600 MIPS mainframe to a 2,500+ MIPS mainframe OR rewriting all the code and moving to a distributed setup. They chose the distributed setup to avoid hardware related vendor lock-in, not because of software.

Even though they're saying "We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix," he said. "No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX..." their new system will be

Re:

[azrider (918631)]

FYI - Their mainframe was running COBOL and JCL

No, their mainframe was running OS/390.
JCL is the mainframe equivalent of bash or csh.
COBOL is the business world equivalent of C/Java/Basic.

Re:

[djrok212 (801670)]

Funny that you mention an OS downloaded from the Internet. Nasdaq runs on a Linux OS, which they inherited from their purchase of INET ATS (Formerly Island ECN) which was built on Fedora and Gentoo, downloaded directly from the Internet. INET ATS migrated to Linux in 2002 when it was called Island ECN, and they migrated from DOS, yes DOS running a FOX Pro database. So you can run mission critical applications on a COMPLETELY free OS, on commodity hardware. Island and INET used both Rackable Systems servers

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[hullabalucination (886901)]

The marketing crap [hp.com] says the London Stock Exchange is the world's fastest, using Microsoft software on HP hardware.

Yes, it's highly impressive. When it's working.

http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2203101/lse-technical-glitch [computing.co.uk]

* * * * *

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
—A. Whitney Brown

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[civilizedINTENSITY (45686)]

Not so much as your date claims: MS launched in September 2005, so the previous uptime wasn't theirs.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[Ajehals (947354)]

If you have the source code to the software you use then you have the ability to both change support agreements (albeit you still have to find a competent firm to do the work), if as you suggest, get a part open part closed system you are getting rid of most of the benefits of the open source part.

I agree to a certain extent 'that it would probably be no more or less difficult to switch Linux vendors/supporters than a Commercial Unix variant' in certain cases (any very large complex or heavily customised implementation) but for *most* companies that wouldn't be an issue, mail servers, network services etc.. the core of a companies IT infrastructure would be made up of common and well tested components, supportable by anyone, custom database or web applications would be more difficult to transition to a new support provider, but if they are *yours* and open then at least you *can*.

As for market share, I'm not sure. It is clear that Linux is replacing Unix in some areas, but it is also making inroads the areas where Microsoft is traditionally dominant.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[Darby (84953)]

Also, people need to remember whose market share is being eaten away by this particular 'win' by Linux: the legacy Unix market is being eroded. Not Microsoft at all.

That's absolutely true.

Microsoft would have really liked to have that contract though. Both for the revenue and for the bragging rights.
So it, indeed, is not eating into Microsoft's market share, but it did slow their growth, however slightly.

Re:Not the same as a Desktop

[Ajehals (947354)]

From a marketing perspective this is very good news, Microsoft ran an advert for a long time after the London Stock Exchange switched various systems to Windows [mainframemigration.org] (but not the trading system apparently... correct me if I'm wrong). Of course those adverts don't seem to be around so much anymore, possibly as they have had some problems [timesonline.co.uk].

Anyway if this is a success (and there is no reason it shouldn't be) and since Linux excels on the server (and frankly is perfectly suited to 90% of corporate desktops) this kind of public roll out is a great selling point and a driver for others large and small to do the same, after all little 10 man operations can suddenly point to their two Linux mail servers and proudly tell their clients that they are using the same technology as the NYSE! (Not the same software or the same hardware (and definitely without the SLA's and support) but the same technology....:) ) .

For those nut bothering to read the links - salient parts are:

As part of its strategy to win more trading business and new customers, the London Stock Exchange needed a scalable, reliable, high-performance stock exchange ticker plant to replace its earlier system. Roughly 40 per cent of the Exchange's revenues are generated by the sale of real-time information about stock prices. Using the Microsoft® .NET Framework in Windows Server® 2003 and the Microsoft SQL Server(TM) 2000 database, the new Infolect® system has been built to achieve unprecedented levels of performance, availability, and business agility.

- mainframemigration.org (December 01, 2006) (Emphasis mine)

Furious traders were left twiddling their thumbs for the last 40 minutes of trading yesterday after the London Stock Exchange's IT system collapsed. .... One trader said: "I've not known this to happen since the start of electronic trading. If they're saying trading is still going on, that's just not true." ....

- www.timesonline.co.uk (November 8, 2007)

Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[ShieldW0lf (601553)]

And who wins? HP of course. Who loses? Sun. Now if they had switched to/from Windows, then it'd be big news. As it is, it's not that big of a deal since Linux is in plenty of mission critical systems. The hospital I used to work at had Linux machines controlling their linear accelerators in radiation oncology.

NYSE, the Ivory Tower of capitalism, switching to Linux.

You know who won? Richard Stallman, that's who won. Congratulations dude.

Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[Deanalator (806515)]

Hahaha, you mean GNU/Linux right?

Re:

[Jah-Wren Ryel (80510)]

Capitalism is the propagation of private ownership.

Private ownership ... of scarce goods.
Without scarcity, there can be no capitalism.

Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[Jah-Wren Ryel (80510)]

Not quite. The ideals of capitalism are infinite profit, infinite growth, and maximum self-interest.

Jesus Christ, where the fuck did you get that bullshit? The "ideals" of capitalism? Just what is that supposed to mean anyway?

If anything, the principles of capitalism were described by Adam Smith in An Inquiry Into the Wealth of Nations [gutenberg.org] where he observed that people do act in their own self-interest -- not that they SHOULD, merely that it is inescapable that they DO -- regardless of what rules society may try to impose, and thus instead of fighting human nature, we should harness it to make the best out of a bad situation.

Smith was pretty certain that labor and property were both scarce resources and thus the way to get the most benefit for SOCIETY was to let them be privately controlled. He never once made claims to 'infinite profit' or 'infinite growth' - in fact just the opposite where he noted that:

This produce, how great soever, can never be infinite, but must have certain limits.

and

The mercantile capital of Great Britain, though very great, yet not being infinite, ...

And some dimwit moderated my post as troll. Get a clue.

Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[DrJimbo (594231)]

Unfortunately, Capitalism in our current society has very little to do with what Adam Smith actually said. There is a similar disconnect between the actions of some/many people who call themselves Christians and the teachings of Jesus. Or the disconnect between what Marx and Ingels said and the modern implementations of Communism.

From what I've seen of the world, "infinite profit, infinite growth, and maximum self-interest" is a more accurate description of the goals of some/many large corporations than anything Adam Smith said. Unfortunately for all of us, greed in our society is treated as a virtue, not a necessary (or unavoidable) evil. I think this is the heart of problems caused by our so-called Capitalist system.

I am reminded of Plato's description of the fall of Atlantis [gutenberg.org]:

For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them. By such reflections and by the continuance in them of a divine nature, the qualities which we have described grew and increased among them; but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.

Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[Vellmont (569020)]

And who wins? HP of course. Who loses? Sun.

Don't kid yourself. Microsoft is also a competitor to Sun, HP, and the Linux OS. Microsoft would have killed to get the freaking NYSE, if for no other reason that it'd be a feather in their cap.

As it stands, the NYSE partially running on Linux is quite a major deal, at least to the Big Business Guys who like to follow what other Big Business Guys are doing.

Troll much?

[Gazzonyx (982402)]

Now if they had switched to/from Windows, then it'd be big news

Why? Because you have a bug up your ass about MS?

When is the nancy boy Linux crowd worry about improving their offering instead of the evil Microsoft? This isn't about computing, it's about being the biggest kid on the block.[...]

Well, you're either a troll or a shill, but I'll toss you a bone either way.

The 'nancy boy' Linux crowd will worry about improving our offering when my cd case at work, for fixing Windows desktops with a blown up registry, is full of Microsoft live cds that I can respin and burn at my will.

Re:

[watzinaneihm (627119)]

It is not that trivial a case.
I visited the trading floor (of which not much exists now -compared to past) in August. The desktops the traders used were Windows XP - Linux in an equal split. Presumably the back-end servers is what they are talking about here which according to the story was Unix. So it is a case where Microsoft had managed to get a foothold in a Unix only shop in the desktop and failed to leverage their monopoly power to capture the Server market.

Re:

[Loconut1389 (455297)]

You need a new lawyer- or to stop trolling- whichever you find most applicable.

Re:Hope the license doesn't give them trouble.

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

You know, if you don't even bother to reformat your article, it really does sound like a cut'n'paste troll. Let's check...

Well, here's one. [news.com] Must be a fairly new cut'n'paste troll.

I'll have some fun with it anyway, and feel free to copy and paste my response anywhere you see this troll:

(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system)

That really dates this troll, or at least, the troll wants us to think it is that out of touch. Seriously, who uses TokenRing or ext2? (Oh, and you can defrag ext2, if you really, really want to.)

So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use.

Sucks to be you. Try reading the license.

It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License.

That's General Public License.

Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available.

Indeed it does, but only to whoever you distribute binaries to.

Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors.

If you're sending free binaries to your competitors, sure. But you'd have to be retarded to do that.

Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released.

Absolutely untrue.

We could either give away our hard work, or come up with another solution.

If you're rewriting it anyway, why not give away your hard work? Worked well for id software.

I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".

And of course, no mention of exactly how that's more fair, other than this comparison to such a strawman GPL.

Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure it remains only a bit player.

Except, of course, a top online investment firm kind of proves you wrong there. I'll point to Amazon EC2 and consider the discussion closed.