London Stock Exchange To Abandon Windows 438
BBCWatcher writes "Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that the London Stock Exchange is abandoning its Microsoft Windows-based trading platform: 'Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE's Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day .... Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect ...'"
Two years worth of use (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in the industry, so I have a little more background on this. They spent about 40M GBP building the system, and it's only been used for two years. It was (entirely?) outsourced to Accenture. Other reasons why the system sucks: It can only handle about 10,000 orders/second, and has latency numbers that are incredibly high (5 milliseconds+).
Looking at other exchanges, there are trading platforms that have been able to last 10+ years while scaling quite well.
TradElect was/is a project management and technical disaster.
Seems like a bunch of unknowing (Score:5, Interesting)
Did the project. They needed a dedicated response time in the 1/100th second range and used a combination of Windows, SQL Server and .Net!
The project was doomed from day 0!
The article is at fault here, Windows alone is not at fault it is the entire stack beginning from the OS up to the implementation language which is at fault!
Linux stock exchange systems sucks equaly bad (Score:4, Interesting)
NYSE and OMX both run Linux based systems. I trade on OMX Stockholm and there is a lot of hickups. I've heard a lot of bad things about NYSE too.
It's not like MS based is a bad platform... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Linux stock exchange systems sucks equaly bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Even the over night batch processing was horrible. Scripts and programs had to be manually started by an operator, then a checkoff sheet had to be signed by the operator. If something happened during execution (fairly common), it had to be restarted by hand, after backing out the failed step. No scheduling package whatsoever. Incredibly manual and error prone.
Re:Not Windows' fault (Score:5, Interesting)
Why am I not surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:1, Interesting)
There still are some documents from Microsoft detailing how the system was intended. Enjoy, before LSE looses its status as case study.
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=200042
mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/windowsserversystem/facts/videos/LSE_CaseStudy_Rev_750k.wmv
http://switch.atdmt.com/action/FY07_Linux_LSE_Download (already gone)
Re:Not Windows' fault (Score:3, Interesting)
"Accenture"? You mean Andersen Consulting? The people that you'd have to be a complete idiot to do business with after the Enron disaster?
I'm can't say that I'm familiar with what involvement they had with Enron, but I've had a half-dozen friends who have worked at Accenture and from what I know of them, they do pretty good work usually.
The key point is that MS was involved with development. Several people I've talked to about this article have said ".NET is NOT ready for enterprise applications of this scale with those requirements." If that's such a well-known fact, you'd have thought that MS would have thrown a red flag up and pressured to have a different tech used for the project.
Maybe this was just a learning experiment for MS (like the first xbox and first couple zunes) and they could afford to lose such a high-profile customer. But that just proves that no matter how big you are, MS doesn't really care about you. Why make the best when good enough sells better?
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Interesting)
MS used to run lots of ads, including banner ads on slashdot, about how the london stock exchange chose windows over linux... Those ads stopped very quickly when they had the big outage a few months ago.
blame Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
"I contracted with the Chicago-based branch of the NYSE a couple years back and I can confirm the bad Linux setups", IANAAC
Do either of you, have any verifiable third party sources for these statements? When was the last time the Stockholm or NYSE stopped trading because of a Linux "outage?
Re:Exchange Server (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that I think of it I believe that I too would like an e-mail address that people with Outlook could not send e-mail to ;-)
Why bother with the truth (Score:1, Interesting)
The fact is the article has nothing to do with dumping Windows for Linux, but one trading platform for another. Neither OS is a real-time OS (without RT extensions or patches or -rt), both can be used in soft real-time applications as is. This is just another good story for the daily WTF, with TRWTF being the headline of the slashdot story.
Similar at several European banks (Score:5, Interesting)
MS used to run lots of ads, including banner ads on slashdot, about how the london stock exchange chose windows over linux... Those ads stopped very quickly when they had the big outage a few months ago.
Several European banks had their asses handed back to them, too, last spring for trying to shove their Windows-uberalles ideology into their core activities. For several months it was (maybe still is) practically impossible to do basic banking. People could go into others accounts, money from their own accounts could not be transfered, money could not be paid into their accounts. It was a hardship for many small businesses that were stupid enough to put their business accounts at a bank where ideology trumps technology. When your own customers can't pay you, money becomes a problem. There, too, the problem lay squarely on the attempt to use MS .NET instead of something workable. It's just a half-assed copy of Java locked into one vendor. After the banks getting bad press for weeks, there was a vague statement made about the company that takes care of the network, but not tying that statement to the ongoing outages.
It's not important to laugh at MS for making crap products, it's important to not use them. The problem with MS products has been around as long as the company itself so it's not like so-called technical 'experts' can claim ignorance or any other excuse. Adding the phrase "with a computer" doesn't absolve criminal negligence for recommending MS products [networkworld.com].
Technology might be a matter of choice, but as the late US Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, has said, the right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. So, that choice does not include the right to screw things up beyond belief for everyone else. It's not a nameless or faceless "terrorist" group that is costing our businesses, shutting down our infrastructure, tangling our air traffic control, our power grid, our hospitals, or stock exchanges and banks. The people promoting Windows and Microsoft technologies have real names and faces and walk among us every day. Take them out and we've won the first round. Why is the military sitting on its hands here? The damage is easy to add up and it's even easier to remove the cause. A side benefit from the cleanup would be a restoration of the freemarket and the usual subsequent boom of economic activity.
Re:Not Windows' fault (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not Windows vs Linux. It's TradElect vs MarketPrizm, which happen to run on Windows vs Linux respectively.
True, but isn't strange that they're going to ditch the entire OS because of a 3rd party software failure? That would translate as: "there aren't alternatives to this software on this OS, therefore we're ditching the OS as well", which makes perfectly sense until one realizes we're talking about financial software... on Windows!
I would expect Linux to offer stabler alternatives, or simply more alternatives, in network software, programming tools or the embedded market, surely not in financial applications. That reason alone makes me believe now there are a dozen chairs flying in Redmond.
inferior software isn't Windows-only, and does exist on Linux too.
That is absolutely true. Though having most software released under open licenses helps the community to grow its IT culture in a way that pays when those people choose a software for their job, be it open or not, in that it makes more and more difficult, if not impossible, to hide bugs and inflated costs behind multicolored brochures and well dressed salesmen.
Re:Not Windows' fault (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for Accenture in one of the "delivery centres" in the Eastern Europe and it was total crap. They hired 1st and 2nd year students for peanuts, and sold them as professionals to rich foreign companies. The turnover of staff was about a third - after one learned something, it was best to get out of there as soon as possible. From the posts on the glassdoor i can infer that this is the strategy accenture employs worldwide.
I've heard the same story from friends who worked for Accenture in São Paulo, Brazil (Accenture's largest office in South America). My former bosses also worked for Accenture soon after graduating with engineering degrees.
Accenture's usual technique is to hire students or recent graduates from technical fields, who are reasonably capable in programming and computer science but know absolutely nothing about the consulting problems at hand or the software platforms which they use. Accenture gives them a weekend's notice before allocating them in real world projects they were not trained to do. These employees are overworked, underpaid, deliver substandard services and most end up quitting after one or two years. The few who don't quit and aren't complete morons get promoted.
Re:Not Windows' fault (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Not Windows' fault (Score:1, Interesting)
They use unencrypted and often unauthenticated protocols to reduce the overhead.
They intentionally use very short or no passwords so they are quicker to enter...
Security, cost, all secondary factors to the need for low latency.
That might be true in their offices, but at terminals in their own homes, security is a massive concern.
I know a FOREX trader, he has a terminal setup in his home, to login he has to hold up a card to his screen, the screen pulses in some fashion (entering the key to the card), the card them pops up a number, and he enters that number. This is on top of his own individual password, and everything going to and from that terminal is under high encryption.
Maybe it's because it's FOREX and there are very large sums of money available once he logs in, but in my experience, definitely not low security.
Let me be the first to say... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Correct, Manager's Fault For Choosing Windows (Score:2, Interesting)
So Amazon, Google, Yahoo, NYSE, and so on choose bsd, linux, or solaris, with good reason. While LSE managers apparently think that the OS that they run on their desktop for word processing is up to the task of running an exchange because, well... why not, they use it all day long!
"Wall Street Embraces Linux" : http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/27/0327linux.html [forbes.com]
"NYSE Moves to Linux" (from UNIX): http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/14/2312210 [slashdot.org]