Powers Unfiltered

In his blog “Tales from a Trading Desk,” Matt Davey poses some interesting speculation:

Will any investment bank has the guts to deploy Mono on its servers to run .NET trading software? I’m not sure. If the bank has already deployed Microsoft .NET to all its workstations why wouldn’t it just use Microsoft .NET on the server unless it explicitly wants to use a non-Windows OS which is unusual since the only banks who really deploy .NET servers are the Microsoft shop banks. However, if just one large bank moving into using Mono, the ripple effect could happen very quickly. Investment banks like to follow the leader.

We certainly follow Mono with interest; it’s a neat project, and we’re as curious as Matt about significant commercial adoption.  But the reasons to adopt it for server-side .NET grid projects are dimishing day by day.  With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS), the OS is becoming more and more capable for heavy-duty grid computing projects.

The combination of CCS, Windows desktops, any other available Windows servers, and the Digipede Network (yes, yes, I’m the president of Digipede) gives an investment bank the ability to put together a .NET grid that will blow away Linux-based grids, enabling .NET developers to create grid-enabled applications in the same familiar tools and programming paradigm they already use today.   Despite Mono’s improving capabilities, the process of creating a heterogeneous grid of Linux and Windows machines is not nearly as smooth.
I agree with Matt’s last point — the first bank that takes THIS step could cause a very significant ripple effect!