I work on trading systems. My uptime record was 9 months. Only went down because the DBs went down and our 3rd-party ODBC lib went nuts and hung on reconnect. W

I work on trading systems. My uptime record was 9 months. Only went down because the DBs went down and our 3rd-party ODBC lib went nuts and hung on reconnect. We traded world wide, so the systems had to be up nearly 24/7. We had a 2 hour maintenance window on the weekends. I know some shops that are US only and start and stop their systems daily. I took stability quite seriously. My first boss was fired after knocking is out of the options market at open on a Monday. Refused to accept responsibility and opened the firm up to a potential $600K fine. He was out the door before noon.