[Info-vax] OT: London stock exchange switches to Linux

[Neil Rieck]

On Jan 25, 2:52 pm, John Wallace <johnwalla... at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

[...snip...]

> Windows may not have been up to the job, but a "soft real time" OS
> such as a Linux with a pre-emptible kernel is probably entirely
> capable of "good enough" performance. VMS could do it too, but that's
> another story, one seemingly of insufficient interest to HP and its
> "partners".
>
> There's nothing particularly new in this LSE story, some folks have
> been doing this kind of thing for a year or three. Like HP, for
> example, and Novell/SuSe, in this 2008 press release (there were other
> similar ones from other x86 folk before and after this one). The HP
> group in this picture is of course the Proliant folks, with x86-64
> blades. Note that this press release isn't a trading application, it's
> a Reuters messaging thing, but there are similarities in the
> requirements:
>
[...snip...]

I was partially-flamed for the initial post so let me add one or two
thoughts.

I don't think the LSE went out looking for a Linux (or, previously,  a
Windows 2003) based system. Some contractor-based company approached
them with a business plan based upon this OS. Now I am as big a fan of
OpenVMS as anyone else around this NG but let's face it, for some
reason companies don't seem to be offering new solutions based upon
OpenVMS. Is it because of the the price of the Itanium hardware
(compared to x86-64) or is it the price of software licensing? Who
knows? But I think everyone would agree that HP is not marketing their
OSs in the same way that companies did 25 years ago.

On a different note, I read an article last year indicating that
Google is the forth largest PC manufacturer in the world. Google? Yes,
they make machines to their own spec for their own consumption. Now
everyone knows that "Google searches" are ridiculously fast and that
their system is based upon a large array of PCs connected in a cloud/
grid configuration. So it makes you wonder if someone ever tried a
similar approach for doing massive amounts of limited function
transactions (like buy/sell stocks) using a cheap/free OS.

NSR