Originally Posted by
FliGuy
I am referring to our trading platforms, front office , middle office and back office. a reasonable mix of mainframe and Linux (who runs on Unix these days :-) ) and Cloud platforms which simplifies the whole process even further.
This was some years ago when Solaris was still viable.
If your data was on mainframe and there were no intermediate stages holding data - just UI and middleware, it's a lot easier to fail over. Especially since there are market holidays every week.
Consider that Amazon has had outages to their cloud platform which lasted for days. Even for professional large-scale providers, the LUM ecosystem is just not designed for that level of redundancy especially when there's near-continuous data streams.
I current work with an environment where we have active-active for parts of the environment, but that's hugely expensive
(reflected in what the client is charged) and there's still the headache of getting bad data replicated across to both sites.
(sigh) I miss working with a mainframe back end. You could depend on those guys to keep their promises of uptime.
Then again... it did cost an arm and a leg.
Originally Posted by
Ancient Observer
The IT spend in the Fin businesses is huge. I don't have the Gartner numbers to hand, but merchant bank type businesses at c 14% of t/o. rings a bell. The timing critical guys and girls see 25% of t/o.
At the quant hedge fund, IT spending was the 2nd biggest cash line item - after disbursements to partners.
We spent more on IT than on labor, and that's with some pretty highly paid folks on staff
(not me - the folks doing the financial models).
I suspect the BA chief is parsing his words very carefully in that the data center was in UK and the on-site staff are British.
But the team actually supporting the software are likely NOT to be 100% local.
As I recall, there was a major outage of a British bank some years back where it was because the India-based team made a procedural mistake and it fouled up the system horribly where payments weren't scheduled, deposits weren't processed, etc....
A system which is precarious needs experienced hands, and outsourcing is often the worst thing you can do.
ETA:
Here we go - 2012 outage of RBS
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/p...-in-India.html