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.'"

Not the same as a Desktop

[phantomcircuit]

It should be noted that the problems the NYSE is dealing with are very remote from those that the average desktop user is.

Now I know this seems obvious, but the "WOW if the NYSE is doing it!" crowd should try and control themselves at least a little.

So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[the_humeister]

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.

Re:Reliability

[Colin Smith]

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.
 

Inevitability, Mr. Anderson.

[headkase]

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.

NASDAQ hasn't changed

[compumike]

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:Reliability

[rubycodez]

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

[zx-15]

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

Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[ShieldW0lf]

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:Not the same as a Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

In the auto industry, the mantra was "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday."

In this case, it looks like "Sell on Monday, Win on Sunday." :)

Re:Unix to Unix-like change isn't big

[watzinaneihm]

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:Solaris?

[rubycodez]

you must be confusing opensolaris with solaris, you won't be recompiling your Sun-mandated & supported closed source solaris. If you ran opensolaris you'd be totally unsupported.

Re:no fooling.

[aztektum]

This made downtime cost something like $4 million / hour.

Boohoo. I mean not to sound utterly cynical, but an outage didn't cost them squat, other than whatever extra expense they would incur to expedite repair. That's almost like saying the MAFIAA loses money to piracy. You can't LOSE what you don't have.

Right I know, it's economics, accounting, Wallstreet math. Blah blah. I had those classes too. I am really not every sympathetic to billion dollar businesses potential for failure.

A) It won't happen because the Gov would just bail them out on our dime (ala the airlines the last few years) B) "The Bells" in particular have stuffed enough tax breaks and kick backs into their pockets over the years, fuck them and their "4 million / hour."

You forgot an option.

[palegray.net]

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.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[QuantumG]

You're right.

A typical patch from Microsoft takes years, if at all.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[timeOday]

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

Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (as in beer)

[Vellmont]

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:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[Vellmont]

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.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[Ajehals]

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.

Death of Unicies predictions becoming a reality

[kolbe]

This falls directly in line with what has been predicted for several years now: Linux will replace all Unicies over the course of time. I remember InfoWorld stating this in 2005, but know it was stated prior to that.

Most recently notable comes from the Gartner group : Here [serverwatch.com]

The Gartner group, while I've never completely believed in, states that Linux will kill off most large installations of Iron Unicies by 2009. While I believe this is a bit optimistic and the reality is that it will never truly die, Linux continues to take more market share away from other UNIX installations than Windows.

distributed systems

[darkuncle]

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 be done, and it's definitely the direction that network and systems architectures are headed.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[Darby]

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:Reliability

[teslatug]

Nope it's Linux. It's happened to some of my customers as well. Obviously it doesn't happen to everyone, but it does happen. I've also had customers on AIX and Solaris that choke up, but they do under much higher usage and much more rarely. If all you do is server web pages, you might get 5 nines, but start dealing with systems that really pound the memory subsystem and you'll see linux start to choke. This was on RHEL3 (was still under support by the way) but it happened under RHEL4 as well. No idea how RHEL5 fares nowadays.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[Foofoobar]

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.

You just don't get open source and Linux at all do you? If there is a bug, we ALL have the ability to track it down ourselves and even fix it ourselves if we have the know how. I've had to fix many a bug before a patch was released and had to create work arounds before patches were released. I was able to do this because it was open source; had this been Windows, I would be waiting on my hands until they issued a patch but because it is Linux and it's open source, I'm able to get under the hood and tinker and fix things myself.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[TooMuchToDo]

A typical patch from Microsoft takes years, if you're a consumer.

Fixed that for you.

If Windows was running somewhere with high visibility and intense needs like the NYSE, Microsoft would have the problem fixed extremely quickly.

Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free

[Calinous]

Or at least come with a fix for that situation (and that only). The other customers will probably wait weeks or months for that fix

Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux

[DrJimbo]

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:Not the same as a Desktop

[Herschel Cohen]

"... on a home desktop, too. Linux is better than Microsoft in every way..."

The more accurate assertion would be /every/many/s [i.e. perlease for substitute "every" with "many", because that is tne more truthful statement. Indeed, I only have a Linux desktop and it is my work environment. Nonetheless, I cannot ignore Windows entirely, because clients depend upon it even when it produces errors. As an example, I develop web pages and test using Firefox, however, it was a shock to see the home page header mangled by IE 6 (it's fixed in a test version, but not yet on what surfers see). Now that is the negative side.

I am told by people I trust, that are not artistically challenged as I am, that both Photoshop and Dreamweaver are quality products even when they are run on Windows. Though I prefer Linux, I would not like to see a mon-culture OS take over the desktop. Real competition based upon quality trumps a market strangle hold even if it were exercised by a product line I preferred.