London Stock Exchange may ditch Window$

[0iD]

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTR...e=uktechnology

The London Stock Exchange, under new top management since May, is considering changing its Microsoft-based trading system after fixing a glitch that caused a seven-hour outage last September.

An LSE spokeswoman said on Thursday the company constantly reviewed its technology to ensure it remained competitive in terms of speed, capacity and cost, and said last year's systems failure was not a motivation.

"The issue with the software ... was a combination of circumstances and a fix has been put in place. Nonetheless, because it's a very fast-moving business we need to remain competitive and will always keep technology under review."

"We're looking at our trading system and we're looking at what our options are. There haven't been any decisions made at all," she said.

[TheAnimus]

Its more about TradElect than the OS really.

In all honesty there is so very little to make you choose one OS over the other in this type of task, because you end up twisting it so horrifically into a shape. The money and resources available mean you don't need to worry about that RAD like we can get this bit done easy if we leverage on windows.

[Barrichello]

lol the irony. Can not say im surprised, i remember that outage, all it did was push traders further towards the new MTF's like chi-x stealing their business (which its core matching engine runs on Linux)

Also, when it comes to mission critical exchange servers i don't remember any bank/customer asking me to install Eurex Miss's trading platform on a windows platform, its Solaris all the way.

[synaesthesia]

That'll be interesting, as the linux multi-head support on the matrox GPU's they use are shoddy to say the least.

[Barrichello]

That'll be interesting, as the linux multi-head support on the matrox GPU's they use are shoddy to say the least.

GPU's had no relevance to this incident. The outage was locally at exchange architecture level rather than the front end software trading os if thats what you are referring to? - ie you could of had any ISV/trading platform that day on any os, but physically the exchange could not process the orders due to its core outage.

But in regard to front end trading we have plenty of traders (approx half) using Linux with multi-head displays. Mixture of Matrox QUID/ Nvidia. Just install driver and and ftp/scp a defined XF86config to new machines and away you go

[synaesthesia]

Ah, fair enough, never had the chance to play with any of the backroom kit, just the clients

[Jay]

was the outage an OS fault?

[TheAnimus]

was the outage an OS fault?

No, it was a design fault in their software, their 'e trading platform'.

[Jay]

so why would that force them to ditch windows?

[Barrichello]

so why would that force them to ditch windows?

Well there is no forcing as such, its just that the LSE is losing allot of customers right now to new mtf's mostly due to being undercut on clearing/settlement fees, but also in allot of peoples eyes there is the issue of reliability......

The fact is that amidst much fanfare the LSE as one of the largest stock exchanges in the world, chose Microsoft for their new platform, a mixture of (win2003/C/.net /Microsoft SQL server 2000) whilst other exchanges (including the LSE's competitors) are embracing (or have been using for ages) Unix based systems.

edit: Found good blog i had bookmarked from last year on this http://blogs.computerworld.com/londo...fers_net_crash

[Jay]

Oh dear, SQL 2000 is a horrible product.

[Barrichello]

whoops - just in case they wanted to drive any more customers away

What a crazy morning!!

http://www.citywire.co.uk/personal/-...aspx?ID=370084

[abaxas]

LOL

Poor MS, consoles that break, os full of holes and cant do any large projects.
Do they do anything well? *

* to add, they do nice mice.

[Moby-Dick]

ouch.
did they try turning it off and on again ?

surely there is some form of Business continuity plan that would have started to come into place by now ?

[abaxas]

ouch.
surely there is some form of Business continuity plan that would have started to come into place by now ?

I think the plan is already underway, they sacked the person who brough in the system and are getting an alternative.

[Moby-Dick]

I think you misunderstand what's meant by "business continuity".