The London Stock Exchange moves to Novell Linux - Additional

[Basil Chupin]

.......

So why is the biggest of big business switching to Linux from Windows 
and Unix? It's the three "Ss": speed, security, and stability.

Day trading is so 20th century. Today's sharp traders make their cash by 
running programs that trade milliseconds ahead of the other guy in High 
Frequency Trading 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aBBFQ6thBuiY>. 
To do that you need /really/ fast stock exchanges, which is where Linux 
comes in.

As a Deutsche Borse representative told me these days, "Speed, or 
'low-latency,' is everything for exchanges. A fraction of a second can 
mean mega gains or losses to investors. Transactions that once took 
minutes and seconds to complete are now processed in thousandths and 
millionths of a second, with the fastest trading engines reaping the 
biggest benefits."

They also have to be secure. When you're looking at a million plus 
transactions per second, which is what both the LSE and Deutsche Borse 
claims their platforms can do, you don't want anyone messing with the 
till for even a micro-second.

In addition, these systems have to be stable. The LSE failure cost 
millions of pounds. Traders, who'd expected a good day, were infuriated 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/2795836/London-Stock-Exchange-failure-floors-share-price-rally.html>. 
Any system can, and will, fail, but Linux is simply far more stable on 
servers than its competitors.


http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/the-london-stock-exchange-moves-to-novell-linux/8285

-- 
Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

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