General Chat Thread, IT crash halts FTSE in General; Sometimes I think my job is stressful, but I wouldn't want to have to explain this
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...SIQ&refer=home
London Stock Exchange ...
London Stock Exchange Group Plc, operator of the world's fourth-largest market, broke down on the busiest morning for European equities in nine months, hurting clients who trade an average $17.5 billion a day.
Trading resumed at 4 p.m. after an earlier computer failure left clients unable to buy or sell shares for about seven hours, according to the LSE's Web site. About 352 million shares, worth about $2.5 billion, changed hands in the first hour of trading before the halt, more than twice the amount in the same period a week ago, sending the FTSE-100 index up as much as 3.8 percent.
The breakdown left traders in Europe's financial capital in limbo as equities around the world rallied on the U.S. government's takeover of mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The LSE, Europe's oldest independent exchange, said attempts to fix its biggest computer failure in more than eight years was ``taking longer than expected.''
I recall MS using the London Stock Exchange as a sales point of MSwindows servers.
London Stock Exchange: Achieving Record Reliability Using Windows over Linux
The London Stock Exchange needed a scalable, reliable, high-performance stock exchange ticker plant to win more trading business and new customers and replace its earlier system. Roughly 40 per cent of the Exchange’s revenues are generated by the sale of real-time information about stock prices. The exchange used the Microsoft® .NET Framework in Windows Server® 2003 and the Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database to build the new Infolect® system and has achieved unprecedented levels of performance, availability, and business agility. Launched in September 2005, it is maintaining the London Stock Exchange’s world-leading service reliability record while reducing latency by a factor of 15. Its successful implementation, with support from Microsoft and Accenture, shows the London Stock Exchange’s leadership in developing next-generation trading systems.
oh yes the problem was definitely not an upgrade of windows/.net tradeelect platform oh no it was er ... network issues!? Can you imagine the panic if they have to announce that actually the trading platform is not reliable and cannot scale to high volumes. Perhaps after the market had risen 200 points they thought just turn it off then it can't fall.
• Substantially faster for trades than previous system
• One hundred per cent reliable on high-volume trading days
The London Stock Exchange previously disseminated data through the London Market Information Link (LMIL®)—based on an HP NonStop (Tandem) environment and written in COBOL language. HP acquired Tandem when it took over Compaq. Although the architecture is extremely reliable, new developments and capacity increases are complex, time consuming, and costly to implement.
The old architecture HP / COBOL / Linux was reliable but too expensive so it was ditched. You can't make this stuff up.
HP Non-stop servers.....well, the clues in the name. Designed for 24/7 environments and bullet proof reliability. I'd be amazed if they ditched those for a load of wintel x64 clusters. More likely is the new .NET based application runs on HP Itanium servers, similar in terms of price and performance to Non-stop....but with that all important ability to run windows instances. Not sure about Windows for itanium being a contender to the crown of unix as king of big iron....i don't see companies falling over themselves to write windows apps for itanium servers....although SQL 2005 i would imagine runs quite nicely on the itanium behemoths AND has the advantage of being much cheaper than Oracle when you start looking at cpu core licensing.
Don't you feel sorry for them traders....think of the six figure bonuses they've lost out on as a result of the down time. Poor things.
The only problem with linux/unix deployment is the DBMS behind it. Oracle is insanely expensive, so if they want to save a few bucks they will have to use some other product. MySQL has yet to be proven for extremely high volumes of data although I am sure it can handle it, although it would be interesting to see some benchmarks of the two DBMS' side by side.
Comparitively the cost of windows / sql could potentially be cheaper than the cost of oracle (although linux is free!) which is probably what motivated them to do the switch.
However, it seems they have sacrificed reliability in favour of reduced cost so the people who made the decision to switch SHOULD be kicking themselves for trying to save (comparitively) a few bucks by moving away from unix/oracle as it cost them dearly in the end.
But HEY! The stock market is a game of chance isn't it? People buy and sell millions every day, should be loose change right? RIGHT?
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Originally Posted by tech_guy 
You can't make this stuff up.
