And it's able to go and get any historic data. It can scale up to thousands of machines (petabytes range), it can scale up to simultaneously ingest thousands of data flows, and so on, and continue to do whatever you want based on event processing (Storm can watch for any strange rules you can come up and fire off events [triggers] to an other component to execute trades), without stopping the flow for even a second.

It's a proof of concept in distributed systems engineering.