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New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

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InformationWeek examines the use of Red Hat Linux by the New York Stock Exchange. "Linux has been known to be in use at several New York financial services firms, but few have stepped up to the podium to testify on the value of their implementations. As a result of mergers and acquisitions, the New York Stock Exchange has migrated over the last few years from HP-UX to IBM AIX to Sun Solaris to Linux. NYSE Group CIO Steve Rubinow said the conversion to Linux followed the acquisition of the Euronext exchange in 2007. Unlike some trading companies that suggest Linux is running their secondary systems, Rubinow emphasized that Linux is running the NYSE's mission-critical trading systems."
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New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

Posted May 15, 2008 21:28 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Are there any stockbrokers, merchant banks or stock exchanges that 
*aren't* converting from Solaris et al to Linux? Every single one I know 
of is doing so or is planning it if they haven't already. If there's one 
thing bankers grok it's RoI :)

New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2008 3:36 UTC (Fri) by cjs (subscriber, #45842) [Link]

We were moving to Linux from Solaris, but have decided that Solaris 10 on x86 and AMD64 gives
us more bank for the buck. Plus we only have to pay for the hardware, not the Red hat license.
Plus a number of our applications have proven to be much more stable under Solaris AMD64 then
Linux on HP DL hardware. Not starting a flame war, just saying what we have seen. 

That being said, all of our Quant Work is moving over to Linux 100%. 

I'm agnostic, I like Linux for some things and Solaris for others. 

'Nuff Said. 



New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2008 3:53 UTC (Fri) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

if you don't want to pay the RedHat license you have many other Linux options.

New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2008 4:30 UTC (Fri) by pbrutsch (subscriber, #4987) [Link]

Mission critical stuff like this you DO NOT screw around with. If the vendor supports their
package under AIX, HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Solaris, and nothing else, then those
are what your choices are.

That the package will work under CentOS, *BSD, etc is irrelevant. You don't want to be on the
receiving end of the TPTB's wrath if the package breaks (for any reason) and vendor refuses to
help you because you put in on CentOS 5 instead of RHEL5.

New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2008 4:30 UTC (Fri) by ebirdie (subscriber, #512) [Link]

I'm not affiliated with Red Hat in anyway, still, I think that calling Red Hat's service
subscriptions as "tax" is unfair or impropriate. By all means it isn't comparable in any
degree to M$ offerings, which are very binding by nature and thus makes switching very hard or
in worst cases practically impossible. This is the significant difference.

Secondly I really wonder, how a financial organization can run any critical systems without
payed support, either internal or external. Here the difference is that the organization can
hire couple of Linux kernel hackers, but not the other way.

In other words "tax" plays down to free beer -thinking, which is just wrong.

New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2008 5:40 UTC (Fri) by cjs (subscriber, #45842) [Link]

True, I'm a big fan of Debian and Gentoo. 

But our vendors have either specified support for either 
Red Hat Linux or Solaris for the vast majority of our 
applications. No support for SuSE, Debian or any other
distro. 

So Engineering has declared that RH Linux is THE supported
standard for applications. Both internally and from our vendors, 
so..... 

Yea I know. 

New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2008 7:14 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Presumably you are paying Sun for Solaris support...  In which case, what's the difference
from installing RHEL and paying Red Hat for support?  In both cases the OS is open source, you
are paying for support not for a license.  

If you don't need Linux support you can install CentOS or various other options.

New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2008 12:51 UTC (Fri) by danpb (subscriber, #4831) [Link]

Of course you *are* paying for the equivalent Solaris software license; the cost is merely
added to that of the Solaris AMD64 hardware you bought so you don't see it as a separate line
item.

Hardware requirements

Posted May 16, 2008 8:17 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Instead of running on proprietary hardware, the exchange, now known as NYSE Euronext, runs on 200 four-way HP ProLiant DL585 servers and 400 ProLiant BL 685c blade servers.
600 servers? What on earth are they doing? I thought a stock exchange was a pretty simple business.

Hardware requirements

Posted May 16, 2008 12:45 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

600 servers? What on earth are they doing? I thought a stock exchange was a pretty simple business.

I guess that while each transaction is simple, there are lots of them happening simultaneously on a very large stock exchange like NYSE. And maybe the code handling is written in Java with all buzzword-compliant middleware...

Hardware requirements

Posted May 16, 2008 21:09 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Let us see... In their latest report, they acknowledge handling 4 thousand millions (that is US billions) shares per day just in "NYSE listed issues", and maybe twice that overall. Despite being called "NYSE Euronext transactions" I don't find transaction data reported too clearly; however we may assume that each transaction handles an average of 10 shares each way, as the "TRF" figure seems to imply: 230 millions of that every day. Again, twice that might be the global transaction figure.

So very approximately we might have about 4*10^8 transactions every day. Assuming they are distributed evenly during the day we would have about 5k operations per second. If you can get 100 transactions per second out of a server (not a bad record for a database) then just about 50 machines will do. Also you would probably have separated database and back-end layers, with about half the machines for each group -- for a total of 100 servers. But the load is characteristically not evenly distributed; with two overlapping cycles of 8 hours each, the number should at least triple up. Add a security factor of 2, and there you have it: 600 servers.

Within the bounds of such a gross estimation, 600 servers sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Hardware requirements

Posted May 20, 2008 13:12 UTC (Tue) by sean.hunter (subscriber, #7920) [Link]

Lots of market participants run algorithmic trading strategies where low latency exchange
connections are extremely important.  They pay the exchange to have dedicated hardware at the
exchange.

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