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.'"

Re:Reliability

[Smooth Hound]

Whoever claim 5 nines uptime is an idiot.

Do the math, 99.999% means 1 hour downtime in 10 years.

And of course, if the same people get (much) better uptime from HP-UX and AIX than Linux, of course it is not Linux that is less reliable...

Linux has its places. A mission critical database server is not one of them.

Re:Reliability

[alshithead]

"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.

"Proprietary UNIX"?

[upnarms]

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].

Re:Reliability

[teebob21]

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.

maybe headline should have been

[rubycodez]

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.

They might have some scalability issues

[mcolom]

If I recall correctly, 1 year and a half ago only IBM was able to put 64 CPUs on a Xeon based architecture. SLES 9 was only certified for up to 16 CPUs. The 64 bits version did not even support NUMA, and that had a direct impact on OS performance under high load, which I was able to measure very easily. The memory bus could saturate just because the OS was not able to put the processes on the memory chip which was near the assigned processor. That distribution had a 2.6.5 kernel version. Redhat was almost on the same kernel version. The version under development was 2.6.17. Suse said that NUMA was going to be supported in SLES 10, which shipped one year ago. I don't know if it did.

I guess the situation has improved in the last year, but my point is that linux is a newcomer in the big iron world.

But the point is that Sun/HP/IBM have been managing big irongs with more than 64 cpus for 5-10 years already, in critical mission bussiness.

This is a political decision. Not a technical one. Linux has it's role in the server market, and it's a very important one. But I think it's not still mature enough to compete in high-performance, high scalable, mission critical environments with OS/400, AIX, Solaris, etc. Neither are the OS suppliers, Suse and Redhat.

Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Capitalism is the propagation of private ownership.

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

Re:no fooling.

[the eric conspiracy]

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 the processes that record the traffic to CDR files.

Re:NASDAQ hasn't changed

[djrok212]

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 Gentoo, both downloaded directly from the Internet.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[djrok212]

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 and Dell Servers. There was zero Microsoft or any other commercial OS in a system that handled 30% of all OTC trades and a 100% uptime.

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

[TubeSteak]

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 IBM p servers running AIX and x86 HP servers running Linux.

FYI - Their mainframe was running COBOL and JCL

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[hullabalucination]

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:Not the same as a Desktop

[Ajehals]

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:"Proprietary UNIX"?

[n4djs]

Well, this is correct - but does not take into account the various closed source enhancements that incompatible between platforms (HACMP vs. MC/ServiceGuard,smit vs. sam, various network utilities, backup software, etc.) Posix only solves a small portion of the problem.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[civilizedINTENSITY]

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 (as in bee

[azrider]

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:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (as in bee

[Vellmont]

I didn't get any of what you're saying from the article. When I see statements like:

"We're trying to be as independent of any technologies as we can be."

and:

Rubinow acknowledged that Solaris has the ability to run on multiple hardware platforms, including x86-based systems from Sun server rivals such as HP. But he added that he thinks Linux "affords us a lot of flexibility."

I take that to mean exactly what I just said. If you have any references to more information to support what you're saying about hardware, please reveal them. Otherwise I'll trust the article, and the implications of the statements.

Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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:They might have some scalability issues

[dvice_null]

> Linux has it's role in the server market, and it's a very important one. But I think it's not still mature enough to compete in high-performance,

Linux is not competing on high-performance computers. It OWNS the high-performance computers. Currently about 85% of the top500 super computers are using Linux:
http://www.top500.org/stats/list/30/osfam [top500.org]

Re:Not the same as a Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... Since I do have a clue of what goes on at exchanges these days.

The outage at the LSE was not caused by their OS. Actually most exchanges had their share of problems those weeks...
The trader that said this was probably forgetting some other incidents. All exchanges have had their share of outages. The one proving to be most reliable is Deutsche Boerse (XETRA, Eurex, EEX etc...) they run VMS, but their reliability is caused by heir structured engineering and organization.

Actually most firms in the industry see LSE as the fastest exchange in the world as far as response times go. Newcomers like Chi-X (although they are derived from an existing platform) compare their response times with LSE.

So I could conclude MS technology is faster than Linux (which in some cases it is).

I hate to say it, but the choice for Linux Both at NYSE and Euronext were driven by the fact hat hardware wise they got more bangs for he bucks compared to what they had (Which is a case aganst Sun in some areas of their systems). Linux just fitted that picture nicely.

Re:Solaris?

[sick_soul]

NexentaOS includes an OpenSolaris kernel in its installable images,
which means it must contain some proprietary code as far as I
understand.

See the OpenSolaris README:
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/on/downloads/20071203/README.opensolaris [sun.com]

I quote the relevant part that makes me think that:

[quote]
The encumbered binaries tarball contains
complete binaries (libraries, kernel modules, commands) that are
compatible with the source. These are binaries that cannot be built
using only the source tarball for one reason or another. If you wish
to build the kernel (or some portion of it), or if you wish to build a
complete set of installable archives, you will want the encumbered
binaries.
[/quote]

NYSE Linux

[unixlinuxsa]

Stock Exchanges around the world are making the switch - mostly from HP Non Stop Kernel (NSK) Tandem platforms over to either Linux or Windoze. The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX Group) is following the NYSE lead and just started the plunge into production to (RedHat) Linux as well this past Friday to try and save lots of $ by getting off of the HP Tandem. http://www.tsx.com/en/trading/tsxquantum/news_product_info.html [tsx.com] http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Information-Architecture/80e2b1ee-2430-48c0-86ba-7e39ef356a52.html [itworldcanada.com] At this point they only have their symbol (X) on the stock exchange but expect to rollout in 2008 with the rest of the stock symbols. If they have a system crash (not because of Linux but the app of course) similar to a few times in the 90s they will have their name all over the news in Canada.