The recent roller-coaster ride taken by the world's financial markets has put financial media powerhouse Bloomberg LP to the test. The company's platform for financial information and stock trading tools has seen more data flowing over it than ever before, reports Shane O'Neill at CIO magazine. In an interview with O'Neill, Bloomberg CIO Vipul Nagrath shares some of the ways his team and the company network have dealt with the frenzied pace of trading activity.

The Bloomberg Professional service platform carries trade data, stock quotes and other information sought after by investors around the world. On Aug. 5, Bloomberg processed 41 billion changes in security trades, bids and offer prices, which was a 33 percent hike over the last time there was a major market spike.

In anticipation of such volatility in the financial markets, Nagrath and his team spent considerable time testing systems for massive data throughput. "As far as actually coding or tuning the system, we didn't have to do anything because we've spent the last two months preparing for just this type of event. And that preparation paid off," he said.

The preparation over the last couple months included making sure that there is sufficient bandwidth to accommodate both the rate of data throughput and the total volume. It also entailed stress-testing the systems beyond any previous capacity, examining the bottlenecks that emerged and making the necessary software changes.

Because the market doesn't let up during business hours, quality assurance testing on Bloomberg's systems must be done during a slim window of time over the weekend. After Nagrath learned about the credit rating downgrade on a Friday, his team put in a lot of weekend hours to get ready for Monday's trading activity.

For more:
- see Shane O'Neill's article at CIO

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