NY Stock Exchange Moves To Linux 272
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.
Re:That ad about Windows on stock exchange (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That ad about Windows on stock exchange (Score:2, Informative)
Re:what was it on before? (Score:3, Informative)
NASDAQ (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what was it on before? (Score:2, Informative)
They're still using IBM servers and IBM's Unix (AIX) along with HP servers running Linux. This is not a loss by any means, there will be fresh new maintenance contracts for IBM plus the cost of the servers and training of employees on AIX.
Misleading Headline (Score:3, Informative)
actually it's aix (Score:4, Informative)
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?
CPT is a common metric in financial industry. (Score:3, Informative)
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 transactions you process that day. The system is basically going to cost the same amount regardless; if you process fewer transactions, the CPT just went up even though nothing on the systems side changed. But for someone like the NYSE where the overall number of transactions is predictable, it's probably not a bad way to compare options.
More on CPT [ibm.com]. (Incidentally I think it was people looking to stabilize CPT that led to the interest a while back about 'metered computing,' where you'd outsource your IT stuff to someone and basically get a bill at the end of the month, and your bill really would reflect the workload that month, basically giving you a flat cost-per-transaction. Apparently this is very attractive to some people due to their accounting methods, although maybe not enough to sell them on it.)
Good point. (Score:3, Informative)
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 developing hardware failures.
We would assume they would test, test, test to identify the stable configurations before hand. It would be irresponsible to do otherwise.
NASDAQ is an M$ shop (Score:3, Informative)
Re:what was it on before? (Score:3, Informative)
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. contrast to linux/solaris admin jobs that are barely crossing $100k anymore.
disclaimer: i live in a major metropolitan area
They are not "moving to Linux" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That ad about Windows on stock exchange (Score:3, Informative)
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:Will the cost savings pan out? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:pSeries run Power-5 (Score:2, Informative)
Not quite... POWER5 is not PowerPC arch, it's POWER arch; (IBM/Motorola/Apple) PowerPC is a subset of (IBM) POWER. The G5 (PowerPC 970) was a derivative of POWER4 plus Altivec/VMX/Velocity Engine. The G6 could and probably would have been a similar POWER5 *derivative*, had IBM shown any signs of really committing to giving Apple the best chips there can be (instead of just regular ASIC customer service) -- remember the "3 GHz G5" fiasco (the careless Jobs statement caused by a promise IBM in all likelihood made to Apple)?
Otherwise you are correct.
Re:They are not "moving to Linux" (Score:3, Informative)
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/