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The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole Day
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Sep 08, 2008 03:23 PM
from the at-least-no-one-died-...-yet dept.
from the at-least-no-one-died-...-yet dept.
Colin Smith writes "TradElect, the Microsoft .Net based trading platform for the London Stock Exchange, was offline for about seven hours, meaning that their 5-nines SLAs are shot for approximately the next 100 years. The TradElect system was launched back in June of 2007 and was designed for increased speed and system capacity."
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The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole Day (Score:5, Funny)
...now if only my wife would do that! /rimshot!
Re:The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole D (Score:5, Funny)
nudge nudge, wink wink.
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That's okay (Score:5, Funny)
most of the american stock exchanges have been going down all year.
Re:That's okay (Score:5, Funny)
most of the american stock exchanges have been going down all year
My wife did that once. Nearly killed me. Come to think of it, it was just after we signed up for the life insurance ...
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99.9967% Uptime if up the next 100 years (Score:5, Informative)
Re:99.9967% Uptime if up the next 100 years (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, because they turn it on when trading starts and turn it off when trading ends.
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Ugly Day (Score:5, Informative)
It was an ugly day of finger-pointing and near-fixes, but in the end, it just left all the financial firms standing there staring at the Exchange. Definitely was a big deal--and it seemed like a lot of volume spilled over to US markets, creating volume related issues here.
MS should hurry up and patent.... (Score:5, Funny)
.... a method of controlling the market.
Patch Tuesday (Score:5, Funny)
Reliability? (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like someone needs to brush up on their buzzwords, specifically "mission critical" and "services no longer required".
Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like someone needs to brush up on their buzzwords, specifically "mission critical" and "services no longer required".
More like "Would you like fries with that?" and "Would you like to upsize?"
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single page (Score:5, Informative)
I wish people would get into the habit of linking to the single page version of the FA [reuters.com].
Misleading summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Misleading summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the heck they were using MS Windows for this type of environment is stunning... Transactional processing which is the bulk of this type of setup is where Solaris and Linux excel. Any company that builds a system like that on .Net should be thown out on the street.
In short.. Not to rock on Windows, but different platforms always offer different strengths..
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Re:Misleading summary (Score:5, Insightful)
As is normally the case M$ threw lots of money at the exchange to get it to switch unix/linux base to windows net so that M$ can tout that a major exchange is running windows.
Full page ads touting the switch and the reasons they cited were better through put and better up time.
They even had ads touting it here on /.
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Re:Misleading summary (Score:5, Insightful)
No... Actually I deal with this everyday. Windows is great for places where you need desktop apps or such. It also does well when you must have generic developers for web development.
Where Unix/Linux/BSD truly shines is on back office type transactional processing. There are many reasons for this, and have a long history at doing exactly this. Meaning, mainframes may not have every been considered sexy, but they ran critical systems in companies for decades with very little problems... Actually they built such a reputation that when they failed most instantly assumed it was a hardware failure... Working on them, however, takes a more polished developer...
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Re:Misleading summary (Score:5, Informative)
You have no clue. When people mention Linux in these environments they mean Linux running on one of these [ibm.com], not a home-brew distro running on a $150 PC.
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Re:Misleading summary (Score:5, Informative)
Internal? Dual(+) homed servers, redundant switches, redundant AC, redundant power.
External? BGP on 2 or more transits on separate physical runs.
What, you say that you need to account for natural disasters? Then get a second site, at least a few hundred miles away, and repeat.
Virtual 100% uptime is a solved problem in the networking world.
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Re:Misleading summary (Score:5, Interesting)
The Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which uses the LSE's trading platform TradElect, also suspended trading.
Hmm. Smells like a new version to me.
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Re:Misleading summary (Score:5, Informative)
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performed as expected... (Score:5, Funny)
"and was designed for increased speed and system capacity"
and see - it went down far faster and more completely than the previous system would have been able to. So that's progress. It's all in how you present it.
5 nines? (Score:5, Funny)
So their 9.9999% uptime is screwed?
Re:5 nines? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they should shoot for 9 fives instead. When the problem is too hard, just lower the goal posts.
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Nothing taxes can't fix (Score:5, Funny)
After the malfunction, TradElect was immediately bought by UK's government for $200 billion and all its debts waved. In an unrelated story, medicare tax was raised yet again because of an unexpected shortfall.
What, no ads? (Score:5, Funny)
Does anyone else remember the "The london stock exchange chose windows 2003 for reliability, they didn't choose linux" ad banners that used to run all over the place, including slashdot if i remember?
Funny how it's all come crashing down...
"The london stock exchange chose windows, but after 7 hours of downtime wishes they had chosen linux".
5-nines SLA (Score:5, Informative)
"5-nines SLA"
I had to look this up, so I imagine other people didn't know it either (I thought was was a stock exchange term). First Google search result reveals the answer,
The Battle With "3 Nines" and The Goal of "5 Nines" [cubiccompass.com]
ketan (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment from an affected trader: (Score:5, Funny)
President of Exchange: [Randolph Duke has just collapsed with shock] Mortimer, your brother is not well. We better call an ambulance.
Mortimer Duke: Fuck him! Now, you listen to me! I want trading reopened right now. Get those brokers back in here! Turn those machines back on!
[shouts - it echoes pathetically throughout the trading hall]
Mortimer Duke: Turn those machines back on!
Bad upgrade (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That's some strange math... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when is 7 hours even close to "a whole day"? Maybe you meant "almost a whole business day"?
It's a whole trading day--and that's all that really matters when it comes to a major market.
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Re:That's some strange math... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I'm a state employee, and I can tell you that a few 7 hour days in a row would outright kill me.
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Re:Still don't know why... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Still don't know why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait! Are you suggesting that downtime can be caused by application problems, network problems, hardware problems, dumbass systems administrators and a whole slew of other things completed unrelated to the platform on which it is running?
I am *shocked*! *Shocked* I tell you!
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Re:Good lord, they're running on Windows? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh please. Persuasive marketers can get Windows installed just about anywhere including US war ships.
While it is commonly accepted by many techies (and strongly denied by others) that Microsoft Windows is not a suitable platform for that level of computing, sales people often bypass the techies who know better and sell to managers and executives who still believe "you can't get fired for using Microsoft."
With all this said, it will be quite some time (and possibly never) that we will ever know for certain what is at the root cause of the failure. You can be sure that Microsoft is all over this problem both technically and P.R.-wise. They won't let the facts get out if they are damaging. Recall the major power outage that many still believe was caused by a worm attacking Microsoft servers? As far as I can see, the true cause of that failure has yet to be revealed.
But if this was a planned event, or an unplanned disaster resulting from a planned event gone bad (updates, upgrade, other maintenance), you would think they would have provided for mishaps in some way or another.
But as this news story is all I have to go on, there is no indication of cause and so I will not presume this is a Microsoft problem. But it says a lot that NYSE runs on Linux and not Microsoft. It seems SOMEONE did listen to the techies.
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Re:Good lord, they're running on Windows? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps the bit you're missing is that windows isn't quite as bad as the /. crowd likes to say it is. Especially if its an older (translation: fixed & stable) variety like win2k or even nt4.
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but surely you aren't trying to compare NT4 uptime with the 5 9s of a solid System z platform?
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Re:Oh, my. (Score:5, Funny)
The same thing that happened this time?
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Re:Oh, my. (Score:5, Funny)
So what happens when this happens again?
Well, first "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
Otherwise, "Are you sure it's plugged in?"
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Re:Oh, my. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Oh, my. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, it looks like it's hosed. You should probably reinstall the OS.
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Re:Oh, my. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually this is "again".
The LSE used to run on HP-NonStop (w/ Cobol and C as far as I can find) but still managed to take itself down for 8 hours in 2000.
If they're going to go down for a day every 7-8 years it might as well be cheaper and faster. (Articles quote the CTO as citing 10x performance increases).
(All based on a quick google search)
So before the hounds descend upon Microsoft it would seem the LSE has a history managing to bring down whatever system they run on.
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Re:Oh, my. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Oh, my. (Score:5, Informative)
Which from the sounds of this article http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/06/12/231031/agile-trading-software-critical-to-london-stock-exchange.htm [computerweekly.com] was the intent.
One very interesting note is at the end of the article:
Timeline for Tradelect upgrades
18 June 2007: Tradelect launched, reducing the time taken to process trades from 140 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds. Capacity increased from 593 to 2,500 orders a second.
November 2007: Version 2 upgrade. Trading time reduced from 10 milliseconds to about 6 milliseconds. Capacity increased by 70% from 2,500 to 4,200 orders a second. Introduced full suite of Mifid-compliant services.
September 2008: Planned migration of Italian trades to Tradelect platform.
September 2008: Tradelect Version 2 to launch. Plans to double trading capacity to 10,000 continuous messages per second. Aims to cut average time taken to complete a trade by half from 6 milliseconds to 3 milliseconds.
Coincidence that this month was when they intended to release a new version?
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Re:Oh, my. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Tee Hee (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Oh, my. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, that gives a new meaning to opening Windows to Dungeon Dimensions.
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Re:How many failures before.. (Score:5, Informative)
Also he said support was crucial for his company. If something went down, he wanted to be able to call someone immediately. He couldn't afford to just post a question on a message board and hope someone replies. He wanted contracts with 3rd party support that had experience with similar huge enterprise systems that he had.
When I said there were companies who could provide excellent Linux support, he said his ass was on the line if something broke so he wanted to be able to justify his software choice to the the C-level guys. And those guys knew the name Microsoft. So he didn't see anything else as an option.
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Re:How many failures before.. (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, he used the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" defense.
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Re:100 years? (Score:5, Funny)
Guess that depends on what hours it is supposed to be working doesn't it?
c/o User Friendly
"Sid, Stef
- Stef: How reliable is our network?
Sid: As far as our customers are concerned, five nines.
Stef: What does "five nines" mean?
Sid: 99.999% uptime.
Sid: Wait... Why?!
Stef: So would "reliable to nine fives" in our newspaper ad be not very good?"
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Re:100 years? (Score:5, Informative)
5 nines does not mean what you think it means.
No, you're right. By my calculation, the actual figure is more like 360 years.
(Remember, this is a system that only operates 7.5 hours per day, 250 days per year)
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Re:In other NEWS... (Score:5, Informative)
No, he'd waggle his arse .
A fanny would be a vagina in Britain.
Come on +5 informative!
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