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.
That ad about Windows on stock exchange (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:TWNBWFM (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Licensing Fees (Score:5, Insightful)
Good move for the NYSE.
Career Opportunity (Score:3, Insightful)
The savings comparison seems misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Will They be Passing Those Savings On? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think another post is onto something:
1. IBM screwed up the relationship so badly that the NYSE is walking away.
2. IBM has some other, greater, revenue opportunity.
3. Something is going on inside IBM where the sales people can steal each other's customers.
Re:what was it on before? (Score:0, Insightful)
Why not Microsoft? (Score:1, Insightful)
It's Ironic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Linux is not a replacement for Mainframes (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of the time this extremely reliable systems are used to host brittle software written in house. You paid upfront a fortune to receive a system which overall stability is lousy. And why? Because some techies who could not grasp the whole stack went out and bought the best of breed system! It is like driving your Rolls Royce to transport pigs...
And yes, I work also for a financial institution. We have mainframes because it is so expensive to get rid of them, not because we love them.
Re:hmm (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Good point. (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
i disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:TWNBWFM (Score:3, Insightful)
Did I miss any, that's right off the top of my head.
Re:TWNBWFM (Score:2, Insightful)
Not a huge deal since they did not use any Microsoft products before, but the fact that they chose Linux and AIX over Microsoft just goes to show that the financial sector wants security and reliability (Hey has Microsoft patented daily crashes yet?). I do not blame them for using Linux since uptime on them tend to be very high (sometimes in the order of years) and does not require a reboot every single time you make the tiniest most insignificant patch."
Those comments right there tell me you are a fanboy and do not know much about the M$ side of the shop.
The company I work for runs over 25,000 servers. We use Windows, Suse, Red Hat, and some AIX. This depends on which works best for the application it is used for. Anyone thinks that doing everything on one platform is best or even possible is not all there.
Second saying M$ has to reboot for every little patch is not even remotely close anymore, at one time yest. As for crashing, we have over 18,000 Windows boxes (2000, 2003) and they have almost the exact same uptime as the Linux servers. Crashes in Windows again are no where near what they used to be in the pre-2000 servers.
I am not a M$ fanboy, as I primarily work on both sides of the shop. However people who do not see that both have their places in an IT shop or that Linux is all everything needs to pull their head out of their a$$.
The biggest problem with M$ is their marketing strategies and bullying tatics.
Will the cost savings pan out? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Proposal for you (Score:1, Insightful)
Now, write a shell script to convert all these to a compressed form. Movies should change to DivX at max 1400kbs and music should become ogg at quality 6.
Now how would you do that with explorer?
Re:They are not "moving to Linux" (Score:5, Insightful)
So I would say they're moving from Venti Iron to Grande Iron.
Re:TWNBWFM (Score:4, Insightful)
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.