NYSE Euronext CEO Duncan Niederauer said the data centers were designed with similar, uniform architectures on both sides of the Atlantic, one in Mahway, N.J., which has allowed the firm to gradually reduce IT staff. As legacy systems were consolidated or retired, the staff members who served them tend to retire also, he noted.

Rubinow refused to say how many people are needed to manage a 400,000-square-foot data center but said the number was in the dozens, "less than 100," and represented a considerable expense reduction in the budget over the 12 data centers previously operated.

Only 40% of the data center is intended for NYSE systems. The remainder is for partners' co-location equipment to be close to the core trading systems.

In addition to ease of management, the similar data centers provide a simpler development target, a simpler product testing environment. With a short learning curve, Rubinow says, the staff of one would feel at home in the other.

The data centers had to be situated where two utility districts shared a border, so electricity was being supplied by two separate systems. "We have two networks with no crossover paths. There's two of everything. We have no single points of failure," Rubinow said.

Unlike Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, the NYSE had to stay close to trading centers to suppress latencies rather than be located on the Columbia River or other sources of cheap power.

"Until recently, NYSE didn't run data center facilities for customers," noted Rubinow. Now it's in a position to provide data close to the real time of market operations.

NYSE, like other exchanges, knows both what its own customers and customers on other exchanges are bidding for equities, bonds, options, derivatives, and other trading instruments. It can match up that information with financial services from Bloomberg, Reuters, Dow Jones, Thompson, and other suppliers.

Rubinow and Niederauer see new services springing out of the information flow and trading services that will have a global reach. Rubinow says the data centers will use less power than their predecessors, although "green" isn't exactly the goal. "To be a successful competitor, our systems have to be efficient," he says.