The Philadelphia Stock Exchange has implemented a storage area network (SAN) from Brocade which it is using to comply with SEC regulations for capturing and archiving of electronic trades and issues.
California-based Brocade says the system enables the exchange to effectively archive increasing records of trades and issues that must be stored for seven years by SEC rule.
Rich Ward, director of technical services, PHLX, says without the Brocade SAN, compliance would be a much more challenging exercise.
"The scalable solution allows us to easily store data flowing from our trading floor and electronic systems during the day, and then back up this information at night," says Ward. "If we used conventional direct-attach storage systems, warehousing this much information would be too laborious and unproductive."
Brocade says the SAN also speeds data backups while substantially trimming administrative and storage management overhead. The SAN allows administrators to consolidate various tape and disk systems into a cohesive storage pool, centralising and simplifying management of the devices.
"In addition to making our systems more efficient, Brocade simplifies their administration, which further reduces our per-gigabyte storage costs," says Ward. "We now need only one part-time employee to manage our storage and back-up, down from the nearly three full-time IT staffers we had to devote to these tasks before."
California-based Brocade says the exchange has cut data storage expenses by 75% by using its SAN.