London Stock Exchange dumps Microsoft

Couldn’t help but titter when I read that the London Stock Exchange are ceasing their partnership with Microsoft.

The stock exchange has been running custom software based on Microsoft’s .NET framework, together with Windows Server 2003. The whole exchange crashed for almost a full day in September 2008, though they’ve never fully clarified the reason why. When your business is as IT-dependent as a Stock Exchange, losing a full day’s trading is little short of disastrous.

It seems that the executive who commissioned the Microsoft deal has quit, and she’d barely left the building before they were looking for a new system. That speaks volumes about how bad it must have been. MS touted the deal on their web site, promsing “One hundred per cent reliable on high-volume trading days”. Oops, that’s what I’d call epic fail.

Computing on the level that a stock exchange requires is just a little out of my experience, but I don’t think it’s co-incidence that nearly all of the world’s super computers run either Linux or Unix. It’ll be interesting to see what they replace the failed system with.


This entry was written by Mesanna, posted on 3 July, 2009 at 10:52 am, filed under Stuff and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

5 Comments

  1. celettu
    Posted 3 July, 2009 at 11:54 am | Permalink

    I really wish I could use Linux at work…

  2. some guy
    Posted 3 July, 2009 at 12:15 pm | Permalink

    One example of many. I think my favourite has to be when Windows machines nearly caused an 800 aeroplane pile-up.

    The radio system shutdown, which lasted more than three hours, left 800 planes in the air without contact to air traffic control, and led to at least five cases where planes came too close to one another, according to comments by the Federal Aviation Administration reported in the LA Times and The New York Times. Air traffic controllers were reduced to using personal mobile phones to pass on warnings to controllers at other facilities, and watched close calls without being able to alert pilots, according to the LA Times report.

    The failure was ultimately down to a combination of human error and a design glitch in the Windows servers brought in over the past three years to replace the radio system’s original Unix servers, according to the FAA.

  3. Mesanna
    Posted 3 July, 2009 at 1:00 pm | Permalink

    That is frightening :(
    I actually read and commented on a post yesterday (here), which touches on the same issues. The guy in the podcast has a good rant about using Windows in inappropriate situations. He says it’s fine for the desktop, but woefully inadequate in other situations, like the stock exchange or the one you describe.

  4. Mesanna
    Posted 3 July, 2009 at 2:06 pm | Permalink

    Me too :(

  5. politux
    Posted 4 July, 2009 at 6:52 pm | Permalink

    The other day at work one of our servers went down and out SysAdmin gave me a lengthy explanation as to why and then at the end said it was a Windows server. I replied, “oh that’s all you needed to say, Windows servers don’t need a reason to go down.”

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