NYSE Embraces Linux

By Greg McNevin

December 17, 2007: In a bid to reduce costs and promote technological independence, the New York Stock Exchange has announced that it is investing heavily in Linux-based trading systems.

Working with HP, the NYSE is making the switch away from UNIX to a x86 Linux-based blade servers as it expands the Hybrid Market trading system it launched earlier this year.

The Hybrid Market enables electronic buying and selling, and according to computerworld.com, the NYSE has so far installed around 200 HP ProLiant DL585 four-processor servers, plus 400 BL685c blades, all powered by AMD dual-core Opteron processors and running Linux.

The deal is no doubt a huge boost for Linux’s prestige, especially considering the NYSE claims it is mature enough for its mission-critical needs.

“During the past several years, the requirements of investors and securities companies have significantly changed,” said Steve Rubinow, chief information officer, NYSE. “Although order commitment reliability is certainly paramount, users want a trading platform with flawless execution and transaction speed.”

Interestingly, the NYSE is also keeping its distance from virtualisation at the moment, claiming that in its high-transaction environment of hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, the technology suffers from too much latency.

“Virtualization is not a free technology from a latency perspective, so we don't use it in the core of what we do,” NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow told the computerworld.com.

HP claims its technology enables customers using the Hybrid Market to automatically trade up to 1 million shares in a single order – up from 1,099.

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