The New York Stock Exchange is going live today with the first phase of its migration to IBM’s p servers running AIX, and HP servers running Linux. It is estimated that this move will halve the cost of transactions taking place in the NYSE. Though lower cost is the main reason given for this move, I’m sure that top-notch security and stability would have been prerequisites for such a move.
Just today, I was talking to a fan of Sun’s Solaris operating system and a critic of Linux’s reliability for mission critical applications. The above announcement might offer some proof of how far the hacker/hobbyist OS has come, but I doubt this will be enough to convince people like him. I won’t get into another debate about Solaris vs Linux, even after spending the last couple of days dealing with some silly and time-consuming Solaris issues, but all my Linux systems have had been running very smoothly. And this is regardless of the distribution being run (I’m currently using all of Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora and Slackware on various systems, including my laptop).
Here’s hoping to see the penguin go even further.
5 thoughts on “NYSE migrates to IBM and Linux”
Nice info. I do believe that Linux has come a long way and is now very mature, stable and seems better than Solaris in many aspects.
Solaris has it’s plus points…. then again some say BSD is king.
Solaris on x86 is not worth talking about IMO. Linux is the way. Probably end up eating Solaris plus points in the coming years.
A lot of banks cant move away from legacy systems in UK. I know of one MAJOR bank where the interests rates are manually coded in through assembler. The programmer, a woman has been retired for some time. She is the only one at the moment who understands the old hardware, system well enoughto do the job with any reliability. Looks like UNIX will still stay for quite some time, you cant deny provided rock solid stability.
I also know of a bank that had a new core system in EU. Brought it over to UK and has a commercial advantage like NYSE. Even 0.5% saving in rates is a massive difference for the bank. Been the difference in going under or bumper profits.
I completely agree (although am admittedly biased to Linux) – and I’m so tired of hearing Solaris guys say that Solaris is so much better than Linux. There are financial institutions and governments who run Linux on mainframes powering some of the world’s most critical systems and for some reason Solaris guys keep putting it down… Then there are the ones who had open minds and switched – they don’t even give a second thought to Solaris anymore. Why lock yourself into Sun when everyone else is going with Linux??
The bank coding in rates in with assembler is hilarious. At least they upgraded from punch cards…
Nice post btw; I too am glad to see the penguin going further.
I like Linux, but ZFS looks so good that I’m going to try Solaris at home now.
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