NYSE launches VMware-based cloud for financial firms

Known by the catchy moniker "Capital Markets Community Platform," the cloud will be similar to infrastructure-as-a-service offerings from Amazon and Rackspace. However the NYSE and VMware said it will be in a class by itself in exactly targeting financial services clients, during offering robust security, access to NYSE market data, and minimum computing requirements to avoid performance problems.

The NYSE cloud uses VMware

The NYSE cloud uses VMware, along with EMC VNX storage and HP blade servers. During this isn't the first time NYSE has offered computing services to other financial firms, it is the NYSE's first cloud service with virtualization and a self-service provisioning system, which uses VMware's vCloud Director software. 

Although the NYSE is opening up its data centers to clients, it is not providing the trading infrastructure. Clients will log in through vCloud Director and provision an operating system - either Red Hat Linux or Windows - and at the time install their own software on top of that.