Linux Ready For Real Time on Wall Street? (InternetNews.com)

Posted Apr 24, 2007 20:38 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I donno. Here is my guess:

The business case is probably that Linux is going to eventually replace proprietory Unix systems in the future.

The reason why this is going to happen?
Linux offers a single viable high performance platform that potentially scales all the way from embedded realtime systems, to multimedia handhelds, to personal computers, to servers, to high aviability systems, large enterprise workloads and upwards to supercomputers.

This avoids the pitfalls previously associated with propriatory Unix systems from the 90's were software incompatabilities, development difficulties, and high software prices drove people away from Unix systems.

A vendor being able to provide support for a second party unified software target for developers can not only save themselves a lot of money, but also save their customers a lot of money. Money they could be spending on new hardware, for instance.

So for HP's business case having Linux supported for their Nonstop stuff means that customers currently using Linux to run their web servers and databases and such things on x86-64 hardware would be able to migrate important services to Nonstop platform without a significant software-related cost penalty.

In other words: It makes it cheaper for people to buy these expensive systems. More profit goes to HP as more people are able to use and afford these systems.

For software stack support you have HP working on Carrier-Grade Linux. It's a Debian-based system for providing Linux support to telco hardware. Although it's probably much more generic then 'just debian'. A set of specifications any distribution can use.
http://old.linux-foundation.org/lab_activities/carrier_gr...
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5258815901.html

Posted Apr 24, 2007 20:52 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Since there's a lot of demand to migrate from proprietary systems to Linux, I expect there will be suitable hardware for the fault-tolerant niche you're describing. For example, NEC released fault-tolerant hardware for Linux in 2002 and recently announced RHEL support for this: http://www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2162395/nec-puts-red-...

As for remote mirroring, this can be done on any Linux or Unix platform using J2EE application clustering and database clustering, and a suitably expensive fibre optic link and SAN setup.

In the 90s, Tandem NonStop systems got new competition from Unix based hardware fault tolerant systems (throwing hardware at the problem), and in this decade there's a visible trend towards Linux.

Posted Apr 24, 2007 21:57 UTC (Tue) by Gollum (subscriber, #25237) [Link]

Well, there have been rumours that HP is porting Linux to run on its Tandem servers:

http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;740887293;fp;2;...

Of course, that is from 2005, and I haven't found anything more recent in a cursory search.

Posted Apr 25, 2007 3:56 UTC (Wed) by timfburke (subscriber, #39448) [Link]

Hi,

This really isn't about running Linux on fault tollerant hardware. Rather its referring to the upstream focused work that Red Hat is doing to get realtime capabilities in the mainline upstream Linus kernel tree. We've been working on this for several years, primarily under the inspiration of Ingo Molnar (uber RH kernel hacker).

Here's a link highlighting the open development forum: http://rt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page

So this presentation was highlighting our upstream initiative and describing how it is a great fit for high speed messaging - ie, the AMQP efforts.

Posted Apr 25, 2007 10:58 UTC (Wed) by vanzylst (guest, #42387) [Link]

Have a look at www.stratus.com for systems that also use hardware running in lock-step and that can run pretty much standard RedHat Linux.

The remote system in the case of the NonStop doesn't run in lock-step as far as I know. However, it uses the concept of an active and backup process. Context information has to be periodically synchronized between the active and the backup process by the developer, using features provided by the OS. There are some work being done for the Carrier Grade Linux specification to be able to support similar capability.

Stratus is quite widely used in the banking and telecommunications industries.

Posted Apr 25, 2007 15:40 UTC (Wed) by prl (guest, #44893) [Link]

As already mentioned, this wasn't about fault tolerant hardware, the kinds of huge single machines that implement the core of NASDAQ, NYSE or eBay.

Wall St has been interested in Linux for several years - In 2002-3 I was working at a company which was trying to make system management software for Linux (and Sun) clusters.

I gathered from our marketing and sales people that one reason that Wall St got really interested in Linux was a direct consquence of Sept 11th 2001. Suddenly, Wall St companies needed to replace infrastructure lost in their NY offices, and also realised that they needed to have new backup systems well away from the metropolitan areas which terrorists were likely to attack. The regular suppliers of high end Sun systems rubbed their hands and demanded the full price - despite understandable feelings that this wasn't playing fair in the circumstances.

So, the idea of running much of a trading room on redundant commodity hardware with an OS which they could adapt and fix started to sound like a really good idea, and the backroom development labs of Wall St began hiring Linux people, buying x86 hardware and investigating software like ours. Since the lead time on this kind of thing is huge, there was no expectation that Linux would be used on critical systems any time soon, so it seems right if Red Hat are publicly working on this kind of thing now, about 5 years later.

Back in 2002, no-one was advertising the fact that they were looking at Linux: partly because you don't tell your competitors what you are doing, but also that these places (and their customers) actually have a lot of money invested in a certain software company based near Seattle. It wouldn't do to admit that Windows did not form part of the future for them. You and I might regard this as obvious, but John Q Public doesn't; no need to panic him.

And, as the Red Hat guy says *speed* wasn't the issue - *predictability* was, and our software did provide some useful properties for guaranteeing execution of certain jobs by deadlines, though no-one on Wall St liked it. Actually, no-one in any *other* sector liked it either, but that's another story...

Posted Apr 26, 2007 8:33 UTC (Thu) by jmansion (guest, #36515) [Link]

I think the biggest obstacle isn't whether or not trading apps can run on Linux, but the way that the Linux 'community' and ISVs interact.

ISVs serving the financial markets for markket data etc are accustomed to delivering binaries with support on just a few systems. And customers are accustomed to buying that service (not a 'send us the source and we'll build it' service with T&M support when things go wrong in local context). And that means that you get into the usual hassle of trying to find the vendor and release version that:
- is locally acceptable to sysadmins etc
- is validated by the hardware vendor
- is common to all the ISV products

It remains to be seen whether Solaris-on-AMD (and the Rock chip) will make a hearts-and-minds recovery here. There's nothing interesting in Linux per se vis a vis Solaris for a broker - its just a question of what the ISVs support and how fast the supported hardware is.