ST1901

CASE STUDY: EURONEXT STUDY: EURONEXT
TRADING UP
OVER THE PAST 2 YEARS TALEND HAS SUCCESSFULLY WORKED ON THE MIGRATION OF TRADING
EXCHANGE EURONEXT'S DATABASE - ONE OF THE LARGEST IN EUROPE - TO THE CLOUD, HELPING
THE COMPANY TO POSITION ITSELF FOR A FUTURE AS A 'DATA TRADER'
Following its split from the New York
Stock Exchange in 2014, Euronext
became the first pan-European
exchange in the eurozone, fusing together
the stock markets of Amsterdam, Brussels,
Dublin, Lisbon, and Paris. Euronext
comprises close to 1,300 issuers, reporting
a total market capitalisation of 3,700 billion
euros at the end of March 2018.
In 2016, Euronext began the typical
process of migrating its data to the cloud.
Except that this migration had nothing
typical about it at all. First, the Euronext
database contained 100 TB of data - one of
the biggest in Europe. Then there was the
fact that this was not just a simple transfer of
a database to a hosted platform. The idea
was to create a 'governed data lake' with
self-service access for business units and
clients in an effort to monetise new services
and generate additional revenues.
MIGRATING TO A GOVERNED
CLOUD
"We use Optiq, a trading platform with
systems that work practically in
nanoseconds," explains Abderrahmane
Belarfaoui, Chief Data Officer (CDO) at
Euronext. The huge Euronext database is the
active memory of transactions handled
directly by the stock exchange operator (1.5
billion messages per day). "The database is
compressed (at a rate of 400%) but some
information was not being archived for lack
of space," says Belarfaoui about the
problems of the old system.
Before 2016, Euronext stored its data on
site, on hardware from one of the big
names in the industry. But Euronext's storage
needs continued to grow, especially
following several acquisitions, such as the
Dublin Stock Exchange and Fast Match in
the US.
"Our IT infrastructure had reached the end
of its lifecycle in our European operations,
where regulators were expecting that
Euronext store more and more data,"
Belarfaoui recalls. "Moreover, sometimes we
had to wait six to twelve hours after market
close on days with important events, such as
the UK Brexit vote, before we could send the
data to business units and clients."
The situation prompted Euronext to look at
moving to a hybrid cloud model. "We still
keep trading platform information on an onsite
server because lag times are not yet
available on the cloud," explains Belarfaoui.
"We also use AWS Managed Services in
serverless mode together with Amazon S3 to
have access to a data warehouse with
unlimited storage capacity. For analysis, we
use Amazon Redshift. And taking advantage
of the cloud's great scalability, we can run
the whole system while anticipating events
18 STORAGE
Jan/Feb 2019
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