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

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

Posted Apr 25, 2007 15:40 UTC (Wed) by prl (guest, #44893)
In reply to: Linux Ready For Real Time on Wall Street? (InternetNews.com) by jwb
Parent article: Linux Ready For Real Time on Wall Street? (InternetNews.com)

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...

---

(Log in to post comments)