NY Stock Exchange Moves to Unix/Linux

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is migrating off a 1,600 millions of instructions per second (MIPS) mainframe to IBM System p servers running AIX and x86 Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) servers running Linux, with the first part of the move going live today.



Francis Feldman, the vice president of the shared data center for Securities Industry Automation Corp. (SIAC), the NYSE's technology arm, said the bottom line for the migration was the bottom line. He estimates the move will halve the cost of transactions, and though he wouldn't detail how much that would mean on a yearly basis, he said it is "serious financial savings, very serious."

Trades executed on the floor of the NYSE are matched and sent by the mainframe to The Depository Trust and Clearing Corp., which clears and settles the trades. At night the mainframe handles batch processing and supports regulatory requirements. But Feldman and SIAC found that the costs of running Big Iron, which includes the manpower, software licensing and services, were prohibitive as long as they were under a 2,500 MIPS mainframe.

"The mainframe simply did not make sense," Feldman said. "For the type of work we run, we found price points that were more attractive on different platforms."

Links:

• techtarget.com