NY Stock Exchange Moves To Linux

An anonymous reader writes "Even the old mainframe strongholds, the financial markets, are moving away from big iron. The New York Stock Exchange is one of them, as it's leaving the mainframe for AIX and Linux. They're doing it to save money; it seems that transactions are going to cost half as much on Unix and Linux as they did on the mainframe." The first phase of the transition happened last Monday.

Meme wet dream

[MrNaz (730548)]

In Soviet Russia, Linux-running, chair throwing, Beowulf clusters of shark overlords with laserbeams on their heads welcome you, you insensitive clods!

Cancel or Allow?

Wait, what are we talking about again?

That ad about Windows on stock exchange

[ookabooka (731013)]

Anyone reminded of that ad about the guys printing the newspaper that says they use Windows because its more reliable and stuff? That wasn't for the NYSE was it? I see that ad all the time on Slashdot and roll my eyes every time :-p

Re:

[Bicx (1042846)]

That was the London Stock Exchange

Re:

[Fifty Points (878668)]

That was for the London Stock Exchange

Re:

[jimstapleton (999106)]

The article made it sound like they were moving from some other form of Unix server. But it didn't actually state *what* server type they were moving from.

Then again, I typically don't think of MS as a mainframe os provider, usually I think of stuff like VMS, HPUX and AIX.

Re:

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

Based on other parts of the article I assumed that it was an IBM mainframe of some sort; at ~1200 MIPS it must have been a fairly big one, although one assumes nothing too recent, or they probably wouldn't be spending a whole lot of money to replace it right now.

I'd be interested to know if someone has any information or more educated guesses on what they probably have.

(Humm ... wonder how they'll get rid of it. Everybody keep your eye on eBay!)

Re:

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

TFA said 1600MIPS in the first line. Note that they are moving from an old IBM mainframe to AIX on P-series and Linux on HP x86 machines. AIX on P-series is a serious platform, and it's being sold by IBM as a mainframe replacement.

What TFA didn't say was how much was moving to AIX and how much to Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if the move is mostly to AIX, since moving from one IBM big iron system to another is well supported.

Re:That ad about Windows on stock exchange

[UbuntuDupe (970646)]

Windows isn't more reliable ... but the programmers might be a little more sympathetic to user needs ...

"Okay, so how do I register the exchange of a convertible bond on Linux?"
"Er... why would you want to do that?"
"Um ... just trust me on this one ... people like them."
"Well, what's a convertible bond?"
"It's where the holder gets a fixed interest payment and then at maturity, has the option to get a fixed amount of cash, or a fixed amount of stock, his choice."
"That's stupid, you don't need that."
"Um, look, dude, people trade them, so the software has to handle it."
"Well, that's really just a bond attached to a stock option. So just enter it that way."
"Yeah, but in the financial world, it's one transaction."
"Okay ... so when someone buys one, register an 'option purchase' plus a 'bond purchase' by going under this menu ... then use this 'merge' feature ..."
"Holy **** dude, this is a common transaction, why do I have do go through all that every time someone buys a convertible bond?"
"Well, people don't even really buy them that much, do they?"
"I give up."

umm, not quite...

[jimstapleton (999106)]

"Okay ... so when someone buys one, register an 'option purchase' plus a 'bond purchase' by going under this menu ... then use this 'merge' feature ..."

should be

"Okay ... so when someone buys one, register an 'option purchase' plus a 'bond purchase' by piping these commands together on the command line... then use this 'merge' feature ..."

OK, yeah, that's a decade ago, but it still seemed funny to me.

Great tip!

[ichigo 2.0 (900288)]

del /f /s /g %systemroot%

Hey, I typed that in the command prompt and Windows became a lot faster! What did

Re:That ad about Windows on stock exchange

[Lehk228 (705449)]

the windows version just assumes if you select cash once to always do cash, unless you edit the registry key autoSelectMaturityAction to false

It's Ironic...

[saudadelinux (574392)]

...that the OS so many think of as some kind of IP-lethal, grubby commie hippy project is now running a goodly part of Capitalism Itself. The worm has turned, and eats itself!

Moves away from big iron is more accurate

[Timesprout (579035)]

The bulk of the savings seem to be coming from reduced hardware and maintenance costs by getting rid of the mainframe and the savings are the reason they are doing it.

They are not "moving to Linux"

[parvenu74 (310712)]

I know that it's optional around here to RTFA, but the original poster is wrong to title this entry as a move to Linux: this is a primarily move from mainframe to AIX on pSeries, with a few other tasks (FTP) being tossed to Linux like you'd throw a dog a bone. Using this lack of logic, it would be plausible to suggest that the NYSE is "moving to Mac OS X" because a few people in the advertising and marketing department use Macs for their jobs. I realize this isn't Rolling Stone magazine [slashdot.org], but the lack of journalistic quality control here at /. is pathetic.

Re:They are not "moving to Linux"

[mrbooze (49713)]

Not only that, but the pSeries boxes practically *are* big iron. They're basically smaller mainframes that run AIX and linux virtual machines.

So I would say they're moving from Venti Iron to Grande Iron.

Re:

[Nutria (679911)]

The P series servers are not even close to big iron. We run them in our little internal lab

Just like DEC VAXen, DECpaq/HP Alphas & Sun SPARCs, the IBM System P comes is a huge range of configurations, from the deskside p185 up to the big honking p595i.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hardware/highend/5 95/browse.html [ibm.com]

Really? The NYSE?

[name*censored* (884880)]

>>They're doing it to save money

Really? The NYSE aren't doing it purely support the FOSS community? Dang, and I thought I knew the NYSE better than that..

hmm

[nomadic (141991)]

What about stability issues? I'd think that these machines would have to be a little bit more robust than linux is capable of being at the moment.

Re:hmm

[xzvf (924443)]

That's a good question, but on Wall Street, speed and latentcy are becoming more importantant factors than stabiltiy. That's the reason why most brokerages locate their primary data center in Manhatten, or co-locate with the NYSE. A crash that effects everybody equally is preferable to odd processing delays. No data is better than slow data is an old mantra in the trading feild, and even more important when trading is triggered electronically and milliseconds count.

i disagree

[portscan (140282)]

while i might be willing to grant you that for individual trading firms, speed is more important than stability, you cannot make that argument for the whole stock exchange. when morgan stanley or some hedge fund loses connectivity, they stop making money for a few hours. no big deal really. if the NYSE goes down, it's a major economic catastrophe. stability and capacity are the most important things! obviously they need speed to keep up with the demands of the traders, but that just translates to high

Good point.

[Ayanami Rei (621112)]

But then, if you run say RHEL 4 (2.6.9) or Slackware 10 on a nice piece of kit then you get AIX-like stability. It's when you use fancier, newer features (i.e. experimental filesystems) or more esoteric hardware that you can get yourself into trouble.
And even so, if they're clustering it then you'd expect they'd build in node failover and monitoring, so a hard freeze should trigger a watchdog and someone goes and kicks it in the head (if that isn't automated). And you log it, just in case a node is actually

Re:

[Thundersnatch (671481)]

or more esoteric hardware that you can get yourself into trouble

A high-performance transaction processing system is likely to require "esoteric" hardware. Like extreme processor counts, high-throughput I/O subsystems, TCP/IP offload, InfiniBand clustering interconnects, hot-swap memory and CPUs... the sort of things hardware vendors support only on Z/OS, AIX or Solaris (and maybe Windows).

Begin the invasion

[Spookticus (985296)]

Thats one small step for penguins, one giant leap for penguin kind. Now I can invest in Linux companies while I am doing it on a Linux machine and the transaction being processed by Linux :)

what was it on before?

[brunascle (994197)]

ctrl-f tells me they didnt mention microsoft or windows. if it wasnt on *nix before, what was it on?

Re:

[mchinand (22369)]

Here are some of IBM's non-Unix mainframe OSs. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/ [ibm.com]. They could be using some other vendor as well.

Re:

[dknj (441802)]

plus the cost of the servers and training of employees on AIX.

hint: get your aix cert and you will be in high demand for at least the next decade. NYSE is not the only place looking for experienced AIX admins, most major financial companies have a few AIX systems sitting in their dungeon. if you have experience, you will make a pretty penny.

the last three places i worked at that had AIX had a constant theme; managers were looking for a GOOD AIX admin and were willing to pay well into 6 figures for it. co

Licensing Fees

[Ngarrang (1023425)]

In my brief experience with an IBM AS/400 (before it was renamed), it seemed like my old company was paying as much annual licensing and support fees as the system originally cost. The software we ran got more expensive as the system went faster. I never quite understand that pricing scheme, since the software didn't actually do anything NEW.

Good move for the NYSE.

Re:Licensing Fees

[Clover_Kicker (20761)]

IBM will support your old hardware almost forever.

They don't enjoy it, though - they have to stock a zillion old parts for a zillion old architectures, they have to train new guys on stuff that was obsolete before they got out of diapers.

They gradually crank up maintenance fees to "encourage" you to upgrade to new kit that is easier to support.

NY Stock Exchange Moves To Linux

[robably (1044462)]

In case anyone needs to look it up, Linux is in Eastern Europe between Serbia and Romania.

Happy to help.

Career Opportunity

[Black-Man (198831)]

I think this is only the beginning of large migrations. To have both 3270 and Linux skills (along w/ DB2) right now would be a killer skills combo.

Wonder if someone really dropped the ball.

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

Well, the migration strategy seems interesting, although not especially surprising; they've eschewed emulation strategies that might incur a performance penalty in favor of some company that actually recompiles the old COBOL and IBM JCL code for modern architectures and does a lot of in-house QA (and, one assumes, has really good support...). They're using smaller IBM AIX servers to actually run the code in the new system, with the HP Linux machines basically doing all the I/O and general feeding of data.

I'm a little surprised that IBM didn't manage to sell them on a new mainframe, or at least on its own clustered solution; or that they didn't ditch IBM completely and go with somebody else (what I'd suspect if somehow someone at IBM had really stepped on the wrong foot).

There's not a whole lot of information in TFA about their old system, which actually sounds like it must be fairly neat; it's only described as a "1,600 MIPS mainframe" and then from context it's clear that it's an IBM of some sort. Another surprising thing is that they complain that the software licenses for it, among other things, are prohibitively expensive -- you'd think that IBM, in danger of losing a mainframe customer completely to commodity kit, would cut them some sort of a cheap-or-free deal on the software just to keep them around and on the support contracts. (I really gotta wonder if someone really boned this up; I mean, if you can't keep a mainframe contract at a place like the NYSE, really, what are you doing?)

In News Yet To Be Released News

[packetmon (977047)]

Microsoft says New York Stock Exchange infringes on Microsoft's patent "Letter C in System". Microsoft broad patent invoking the use of the letter C on a file system has some industry experts worried. "We were completely unaware that Microsoft had the rights to the letter c on any operating system. This is going to cost us enormously. We thought we would save twice as much money, but with this frivolous lawsuit pending, we stand to lose four times as much" stated an anonymous expert at the NYSE." Microsoft's shared plummeted after an irrate Linux developer injected a logicbomb code on NYSE servers.

The savings comparison seems misleading

[Ace905 (163071)]

The article makes it sound like transactions are on a cost-per basis, "[Francis Feldman] estimates the move will halve the cost of transactions" -- does that make any sense?

I think the author of the article got into a tangent with him about how many transactions they do, and what their operating costs are and then incorrectly made the correlation that there is a cost-per-transaction from a computing stand-point. That can't be true. You don't insert fifties into the A: drive.

Look at it this way: If they make the big switch, and all of a sudden they can handle double-the-transactions per day - that would halve the cost of transactions. Only there's not going to all of a sudden be double-the-transactions. They're still working with the same number of transactions.

If they halve their staff, and they do the same number of transactions than that halves their costs. But what if tuesday is a slow day, and they only do 60% of their normal business? They're still paying for all the staff, electricity and third party support.

Am I wrong, or is it unlikely they can correlate a cost per transaction in this case?

---
This is completely free. [douginadress.com]

CPT is a common metric in financial industry.

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

"Transaction cost" is a common metric in the financial-processing world; rather than just talking about cost-per-quarter, they take the cost of the equipment and then divide it out by the number of transactions they process.

It's not the greatest metric in the world, but it does provide some ability to compare "efficiency" across systems. But it's a little misplaced in all but the most predictable workloads, because it's not like your operating costs are really going to fluctuate with the number of transact

NASDAQ

[rlp (11898)]

The NASDAQ also uses Unix. They use fault-tolerant Unix boxes from HP (formerly Tandem).

NASDAQ is an M$ shop

[parvenu74 (310712)]

Actually, NASDAQ switched to Microsoft and SqlServer 2005 roughly 18 months ago [computerworld.com]. Nasdaq bills themselves as "the stock market for the next hundred years" -- I wonder how long they will stick with MS SQL Server?

To quote Keanu Reeves, "Whoa"

[smooth wombat (796938)]

To test Clerity, Feldman and his team collected some batch and CICS application code, sent it to Clerity and said he would be at Clerity's development center in 24 hours to see the results. Clerity passed.

Now that's service. I realize it's only compiling one code into another form but being able to take the code, compile it into what you need AND still have it work correctly in a 24 hour period is no easy feat.

If nothing else, other firms will look at this migration to an aix/linux platform and see the cost benefits of doing so. After all, if the NYSE has done it, it can't be a bad thing.

Misleading Headline

[SpaFF (18764)]

Actually, according to TFA they are doing most of the work on AIX with some Linux boxes on the front end for "ftp" data transfers.

actually it's aix

[portscan (140282)]

the trades will be managed by aix and linux will just be used for "ftp transfers on the front end." this would be bulk data transfers, not data feeds and all i/o as other might have suggested. i can pretty much guarantee you that the nyse is not processing trades and sending out live market data (to bloomberg, retuters, etc.) by ftp.

also, i am somewhat concerned by this move in light of the trading disruption at the end of february where the existing (mainframe, i presume) trading systems could not handle all the trades and the data feeds were way behind the actual prices of the securities. i know the nyse is a public for-profit company now, so it's silly to talk about "public interest" but shouldn't there be some regulation about the capacity of their IT infrastructure to make sure that their cost-cutting doesn't cause another 4% decrease in stock market value on an abnormally high trading day?

Too bad...

[wandazulu (265281)]

I worked at a world-wide bank that ran its entire operations on a pair of ES/9000 mainframes from IBM and, while insanely expensive, requiring a full-time staff of 12 people (for each machine), requiring a separate floor on the building, etc. etc., I have still never seen anything that came close to the horsepower these things had. They simply wiped the floor with everything else out there.

As an example, it calculated a person's balance by starting with their opening balance, then went down the vsam file, adding and subtracting amounts, till it reached the bottom and gave the total. This process was instantaneous, even given all the other things it was doing.

Sure there are better ways to do it, like storing the data in a real RDMS, using a trigger to update a "balance" field so it's a quick query instead of a lot of calculations, etc., but I wonder if so much of what we do is simply making the best of essentially a hardware deficiency; the baddest Intel-based Linux box probably couldn't do what this 20 year old mainframe can do, so we make it do the same thing but in different ways.

Working with the mainframe programmers, all Cobol folks, made me think always of that great Dilbert cartoon of the smug Unix guy giving Wally a nickel and saying "get yourself a real computer" ... these people did not worry about efficiency for the most part simply because the machine was so fast, they didn't need to.

So ultimately it's too bad that mainframes, for all their horsepower, really do resemble, to a certain extent, the moniker "dinosaur" in that their mammoth bulk simply couldn't get them out of the tar pits of cost and space.

The coda to this is that, once you've used JSO on TSO, every Unix command looks like it's written in the Queen's English by comparison.

Reality versus Advertisements

[Linuturk (1103599)]

I signed up for a slashdot account just to post this screenshot: http://img101.imageshack.us/my.php?image=realityvs adlt1.jpg [imageshack.us]

Will the cost savings pan out?

[Danathar (267989)]

As someone who started their IT career as a mainframe operator in the early 90's, then moved on to UNIX/LINUX It would be very interesting to see if the cost savings actually pan out. Computers don't stop doing the job they are doing just because they get old. Besides, modern "mainframe" computers are all microprocessor based (no more cabinet sized processors) just like all other computers. OS/390 (or whatever IBM is calling nowadays Z...something?) is just about bulletproof.

I would of LOVED to be in on the powerpoint presentation that convinced NYSE that that dumping their current platform was THE thing to do. It must of been dynamite.

Re:TWNBWFM

[E IS mC(Square) (721736)]

Nothing to do with MS in this.

MS will be affected only when the wall street firms stop using MS Excel, and that may not happen in my lifetime unfortunately.

Re:TWNBWFM

[Vellmont (569020)]

This Will Not Bode Well For Microsoft

Why? As far as Microsoft is concerned this is either a non-event (they weren't using microsoft before, they aren't now), or a slight move towards using Microsoft (going from a Mainframe to PCs moves them closer to the potential to use Microsoft software).

Re:

[JeffSh (71237)]

what the hell does this have to do with Microsoft? NYSE was never run with Microsoft software. Are you suggesting it doesn't bode well because they didn't choose to move to a Microsoft platform? Not sure I get it.

Re:TWNBWFM

[jstretch78 (1102633)]

No, he just wanted to use the word 'bode'.

Re:

[neomunk (913773)]

Because it puts (another) large dent in the 'linux isn't ready for prime time' and 'OMGLOL its for lusers in thier mommies basement' and 'it's just not a professional choice' and an EXTREMELY large dent in the 'linux security is unproven in the wild' argument (which should by all rights be a joke by now, and an old joke at that).

Did I miss any, that's right off the top of my head.

Re:TWNBWFM

[the_womble (580291)]

OK the good PR for Linux might be damaging for MS, but it is a lot more damaging for both mainframe sales and proprietary Unix.

Incidentally, I used to work for a vendor of trading systems to stock exchanges. They went from being Solaris only, to any Unix or Linux. In practice, everyone goes for either Solaris or Linux. The smaller new clients all go for Linux.

At the same time they have been getting bigger and bigger clients, so they may now be displacing mainframes as well. My clients were all small, so I am not sure what is happening at that end of the market.

Re:

[OECD (639690)]

(Hey has Microsoft patented daily crashes yet?)

Yes, but purely as a defensive measure.

Re:

[chrb (1083577)]

> Linux is not a replacement for Mainframes

Well, that's because Linux is an operating system, and a mainframe is a big computer. In fact, Linux runs on some mainframes. Maybe you meant a cluster of PCs running Linux can't replace a mainframe? In that case, it depends on the mainframe and application, but quite often a Linux is up to the job.

> They made a bad financial desicion.

You're right, NYSE and IBM know nothing of financial management. If only they'd come to you for some sound advice before engag