This was partly spurred by the NYSE's merger in 2005 and

The NYSE has been using Netezza's appliances slightly longer than GreenPlum's appliance in order to track and audit trades and orders, Hirsch said.

Before selecting these products, Hirsch said he "evaluated most of the products out there," including of Microsoft, and a that includes SAS analytics onboard.

Both GreenPlum and Netezza are far faster than its prior infrastructure, which primarily consisted of Oracle data warehouses paired with BI servers running SAS, Hirsch said. Having separate servers for data warehousing and BI "doesn't work when you are processing terabytes of data per day ... it doesn't scale to our current levels."

Hirsch said that despite the NYSE doing "pretty sophisticated types of analytics," it hasn't run into problems where the Greenplum or Netezza appliances could not perform desired analytical runs.