NYSE Goes To Linux

Aligrip writes "It appears that IBM has convinced the folks at the Securities Industry Automation Corp (SIAC) to move their entire trading network to Linux as explained in this article in the Investors Business Daily. The authors predict that this deal could give Linux "a hot new beachhead with financial institutions". Cool!"

Not the firsr Sotock MArker of the world with Linu

[GdoL]

A couple of years ago, we at the Portuguese Stock Exchange, started working with Linux. I don't know if it is still used. But it was meant to do a lot of work.

SIAC not SAIC

[edwardd]

NYSE is supported by SIAC, not SAIC. SAIC is "Science Applications International Corporation".

With NYSE making this move, it's very likely that AMEX, NSCC & GSCC will eventually make this move as well, since they are all supported by SIAC.
- Former SIAC consultant

Presumably, its all custom trading software anyway

[hillct]

It pains me to say this but it probably won't matter much what OS is underneath the trading software (except for performance gains etc...) because I doubt the traders ever see the OS at all. It's great PR for linux, but like all PR wins it will probably be short lived. I wouldn't expect traders to wake up each day and say to themselves "Self, I'm using Linux at work. That's neat." It just won't happen...

As for the distribution that would be used, I doubt that matters much either...

--CTH

ahh the financial industry...

[Doctor_D]

I used to work at a small mutual fund company where the network admin got to deal with SIAC for a project. It seemed as if they were a big mainframe shop and the network admin ended up creating a translation dictionary between industry terms and SIAC terms. Let's say (not accurate for obvious NDA reasons), they would say something like street and ths would mean to us ethernet cable.

It was fun working with them. Once we had that translation dictionary sorted out we fully understood what they were telling us.

But more to my main point, is that I'm happy to hear they're going to use Linux, but most financial institutions would run linux anyway. Mainly due to admins with tiny budgets. Like I was given 6 grand to put up a development database server. No way I could afford licenses of Sybase for a Sun box that would cost me that much (even though I would have preferred Solaris), I wound up getting a dual processor VA Linux Systems box and then downloaded Sybase Adaptive Server for Linux (license is free for development use). So I got a pretty nice performance development database box and didn't go over budget.

Needless to say when I left working at the mutual fund company they had more linux systems than HP 9000's or Sun Ultra Enterprise's put together. Granted I met with a ton of resistance to put the first linux box into place, but then management got used to being able to do stuff on the cheap, so more low budget projects kept creeping up, which meant more linux boxes to do the work.

Re:IBM

[quartz]

"A" big company? I'm currently doing some work for a recruiting company mostly dealing with Wall Street giants, and every job description I've seen from them for tech jobs has Linux as a requirement (along with Perl/Java/Sybase etc.). They're all happily using Linux for their non-mission critical needs (which makes sense, since they have one UNIX or another running on the mission critical equipment), but, as someone once pointed out in a Slashdot article, they don't make a big fuss over it because they consider it a "competitive advantage".

Re:Wow...score one more HUGE client for IBM.

[ptomblin]

A few weeks ago our system (which handles 70% of all the trades sent to NASDAQ) accidentally sent too many position updates to NASDAQ, something like 200 per second for 20 seconds, and all on a test stock. Not that many, and well within the spec that NASDAQ tells us to stay within, but it crashed NASDAQ's Small Order Execution System (SOES) for all stocks for 20 minutes.

NASDAQ was mad at us for sending so many positions, but it was really their fault for not being able to handle a volume of traffic that they publish that they can handle.

I can't tell you if the part of NASDAQ that crashed is handled by their new NT stuff, or if it was the older Solaris and Tandem parts. But it makes me think that if the tech stock bubble hadn't burst when it did, NASDAQ would have quickly run out of steam and melted down under the shear pressure of increasing trading volumes.

Still a blow for MS

[Ami Ganguli]

Sure Linux is seriously eating into proprietary Unix market share, but think about it a little more carefully. These guys are looking for something that's cheaper and easier to deploy than the Sun boxes they're currently using. Without Linux, the only choices are 1)eat the costs and stick with Unix, 2)port to Windows (also at considerable expense).

The breadth of offerings available for Linux (cheap 1U boxes, Mainframe LPARS, massive servers) make it a natural choice for people who might otherwise leave the Unix world altogether. It's easy to port from Unix to Linux, and you can run your app. on any hardware imaginable.

Contradictory to Usenix Talk?

[datavortex]

For anyone who wasn't fortunate enough to attend the annual Usenix Technichal Conference for 2001, the keynote address was (brilliantly) delivered by Daniel D. Frye, Director of the IBM Linux Technology Center. In the talk, and the following Q&A, he made it explicitly clear that IBM's position on Linux was that it would be ready for the 24/7 no-downtime, mission-critical environment (like the financial sector), soon, but that it wasn't yet. The indication was something like 5 years or so, and the conference was 2 months ago.

I wonder what changed IBM's position so quickly?