The NASDAQ Stock Exchange is storing "many terabytes" of stock market data on Amazon's S3 cloud storage system. NASDAQ's use of Amazon Web Services is detailed in a story by Penny Crosman at Wall Street & Technology and will be the subject of a presentation at O'Reilly's Money:Tech conference on Feb. 4-6 in New York.
NASDAQ is using AWS for Market Replay, a product that provides data on historic trades and lets investors analyze pricing in relation to news events and earnings calls to gauge the market response. Claude Courbois, associate VP of product development for NASDAQ OMX, said the use of S3 has helped it control costs for the service. Rather than using a database, the exchange is storing text files at Amazon and using an Adobe AIR client application to analyze the trading data and create trend graphics.
Courbois told WS&T that it stores many terabytes of NASDAQ, NYSE and Amex data in Amazon's storage cloud, and adds 30 gigabytes to 80 gigabytes of data every day to the cloud. The data retrieval time is less than one second, and the system scales instantly.
"If we built this ourselves or used a standard ASP (application service provider), we'd have to ask for more space than we initially need and pay for all these empty terabytes until we fill them up," Courbois said.
