Euronext.liffe, the derivatives arm of European stock
exchange Euronext, has reached the halfway point in a programme to
replace 1,500 Sun Solaris servers with Hewlett-Packard servers
running on Linux and Intel.
The main part of the replacement programme involves swapping out
the gateway servers used by clients to link to the Liffe Connect
exchange platform.
“This is the time-intensive element of the migration exercise,”
said James Johanik, senior vice-president of US technology strategy
at Euronext.liffe. “Liffe has 800 sites in 31 countries to upgrade,
so it takes time.
“Once this is completed, which should be in the third quarter,
we will switch the host over to the new Linux/Intel hardware as the
final act of the migration.”
Johanik said the servers would give the exchange greater
scalability, both in terms of its ability to list new products and
its capability to process trades on a contract.
“We have chosen a highly commoditised platform and a very robust
open source operating system,” said Johanik.
With the move to Linux, the exchange is using Red Hat for
operating system support.
On having lost out to HP with the server-replacement programme,
Sun said that when Euronext made the decision to move to Linux, it
was not well aligned with Red Hat, but things had since
changed.
“Since this deal, we have also introduced Solaris 10 for x86,
and made it free and open source. We have also introduced our new
Sun Fire X4100 and X4200 Opteron servers, which we ship with
Solaris or Linux,” said Sun.