Computer World Canada Magazine

The Highly

Reliable Times

VOLUME 1 – ISSUE 1

LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE CHOOSES

WINDOWS SERVER OVER LINUX FOR RELIABILITY

Reliability Is Key in the

“World’s Capital Market”

BY MICHAEL BETTENDORF

Tom Nagy for The Highly Reliable Times

THE HEADQUARTERS BUILDING of the London Stock Exchange, located in London’s Paternoster Square.

LONDON, Nov. 2006 – When an IT system must process 15 million real-time messages per day, with peaks at 2,000 messages per second, even one second of downtime counts. That’s the pressure the London Stock Exchange faced when building Infolect, the Exchange’s real-time stock-ticker information delivery system.

The solution had to have rock-solid reliability, nothing less. “Reliability is one of the key attributes of the Exchange in its technology systems. These systems have to work every day, 24/7, to make sure the markets are there,” said CIO David Lester, who evaluated both Linux and Microsoft^®Windows Server^®2003 for the Exchange’s core techno-

logy systems. “We looked at a number of different platforms for our Technology Roadmap, and we lined up our business requirements with the capabilities of those platforms, and Windows Server was the clear choice.”

In Lester’s view, long-term reliability is a function of a solid relationship: “We wanted a deep relationship with an organization that could deliver the kind of mission-critical technology that we needed, and we felt Microsoft delivered just that.”

For the full London Stock Exchange case study, plus other case studies and independent research findings on the reliability of Windows Server versus Linux, visit microsoft.ca/getthefacts

LESTER SPEAKS OUT:

“We looked at a number of different platforms for our Technology Roadmap, and we lined up our business requirements with the capabilities of those platforms, and Windows Server was the clear choice.”