Posted on 05/14/2008 6:55:59 AM PDT by ShadowAce
The largest stock exchange on Earth is a Linux shop.
NYSE Euronext has chosen Red Hat's Linux offerings to power the critical financial trading platform that services approximately $141 billion in daily trading volume. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed at this time.
The stock exchange win is a dramatic victory for Red Hat and for Linux as the NYSE and its family of exchanges will be migrating from HP UX, IBM AIX, and SUN Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
NYSE Euronext (NYSE: NYX) operates multiple exchanges including, the New York Stock Exchange, Euronext, Liffe, Alternext and NYSE Arca Options. Red Hat's (NYSE: RHT) stock itself defected from the rival NASDAQ exchange to the NYSE in December 2006.
"Today, key components of NYSE Euronext's high-speed trading environments rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are managed by Red Hat Network," Steve Rubinow, NYSE Euronext's CIO, said in a statement. "The pace of electronic trading has picked up dramatically, and across the enterprise, the 6.5 hours that comprise the main part of our trading day includes the processing of billions of messages."
At the time of Red Hat's move to NYSE, Dion Cornett, vice president of investor relations at Red Hat, indicated that the change could potentially also yield a technological win for Red Hat.
The hope was that as part of the NYSE's modernization effort, Red Hat Enterprise Linux would play a key role.
Neither a Red Hat nor an NYSE Euronext spokesperson was available for further comment by press time.
According to a Red Hat statement, the new trading platform includes at least 600 servers from HP. (Specifically, the shopping list included 200 HP ProLiant DL585 quad-core servers and 400 ProLiant BL 685c blades with AMD dual-core Opteron processors, according to Red Hat).
The company said NYSE Euronext did an evaluation of two leading Linux vendors and determined that Red Hat was the better fit.
Red Hat added that part of the attraction had been its Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) functionality. SELinux had been developed in partnership with the National Security Agency (NSA) and applies strict access control policies to Linux.
What is not clear is whether Red Hat's Real Time Linux efforts played a role in the NYSE Euronext win.
Last year, Tim Burke, Red Hat's director of emerging technologies, took the stage at the Linux on Wall Street event proclaiming the virtues of Red Hat's Real Time benefits for the financial marketplace.
In any event, Red Hat is coming off one of the most successful financial years in its history, reporting revenues of $523 million for its 2008 fiscal year.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has since set a new goal for the company, aiming to be the first open source vendor to hit $1 billion in revenue.
Isn’t there some sort of nerd board here at FR that this can go on rather than waste space here with it?
You don’t think NYSE news is worthy of a business/economy ping?
IB4GE
Good for Red Hat, but I’m still not sure I’d trust something like this to anything but big iron.
its a tech ping....
...whatever.
I dunno...sounds like they’re clustering, and Google manages OK. I think there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
Crazy huh? Those communists at the NYSE! So can Castro now claim Linux is part of the capitalist imperialist conspiracy because it’s being used to run the biggest capitalist market in the world? It’s the same logic as saying it’s communist because Castro and Chavez prefer it.
Besides, what's the concern about space? This isn't the second millennium B.C., when people wrote on potshards because paper was a premium item. FR is not written on papyrus, but hard drives, which get bigger all the time. Just the other day I saw a prediction that within 5 years, iirc, data storage manufacturers will ship a yottabyte of capacity in one year.
So there ought to be room enough.
It will be interesting to see what happens the first time they have a failure that causes an outage.
Google doesn't actually care much about losing data or incorrect calculations due to freak processor error. Mainframes actually run each instruction twice and compare the results to ensure everything calculated perfectly. You use them when there can be no error, and I think that applies to the NYSE. But then they did this move, and they probably considered that and decided the risk was acceptable.
You may be onto something there. I peeked inside my computer and there was nary a scribe in sight. Who knew?
Trillions of dollars aren't at stake here. And Linux does run on mainframes.
You’re right. FR bandwidth is such a precious thing that we ought to use what little we have available most wisely.
>>Google doesn’t actually care much about losing data or incorrect calculations due to freak processor error. Mainframes actually run each instruction twice and compare the results to ensure everything calculated perfectly. You use them when there can be no error, and I think that applies to the NYSE. But then they did this move, and they probably considered that and decided the risk was acceptable.
Financial exchanges are more IO-bound than CPU-bound; they just don’t do a lot of fancy calculations. It’s more important for them to cluster for parallelism and risk mitigation so they don’t have a single point of failure.
Preach! ;-)
This is exactly what mainframes are good for. They have massive I/O for one. But even if the calculations aren't fancy, a processor error will make the answer wrong, and that won't happen on a mainframe. It retries the instruction, and if the error still shows it locks out that processor module and notifies that it must be replaced.
Its more important for them to cluster for parallelism and risk mitigation so they dont have a single point of failure.
Mainframes are internally parallel, with hot-swappable processor and I/O modules. In addition to that, you can run two IBM mainframes dozens of miles apart as failover or in parallel, and that also makes for a great disaster recovery plan (they're still running perfectly if the NYSE gets blown up).
Also, if you need to run multiple OS images (a feature of clusters of course) then use LPARs, which separate the different running OS images so well that they are considered as separate physical machines from a security standpoint.
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