Driving explosive growth through AI innovation

Options Technology is a financial technology company at the forefront of banking and trading infrastructure. Serving clients worldwide, Options has offices in New York, London, Belfast, Cambridge, Chicago, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Paris, and Auckland.

Headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and with 13 offices globally, Options Technology is on a mission to transform the financial technology sector. The company provides vital IT infrastructure solutions to global capital markets and financial sector firms.

Danny Moore, President and CEO of Options Technology, says: “Options has 600 customers globally, heavily concentrated in the financial sector and capital markets. Our customers include all the top asset managers, all the top hedge funds, and the top 40 global banks.”

Options has a bold growth strategy. The company aims to become the leading technology partner to the global financial services industry by expanding into new markets and developing disruptive offerings across AI, cloud, and security. 

Andrea Moccia, VP of AI and Data at Options Technology, confirms: “Today, explosive demand for AI is colliding with intense regulatory scrutiny. To help the industry avoid a crisis of trust, we have created a sovereign platform for AI with compliance and governance built in.”

While Options is leading the way in AI for the finance sector, it didn’t achieve its success overnight. Moccia elaborates: “Our previous storage environment was rigid, complex, and costly to manage. It was really holding us back.”

Options serves its clients through more than 700 global data centers. Low latency and high throughput are critical to AI model training for fraud detection, for example, but the company’s previous storage system made it challenging to support fast-growing business volumes due to its inflexibility and opacity.

“Before, it was very difficult to plan our clients’ storage capacity needs to power AI,” explains Moccia. “To avoid the risk of service interruptions when we onboarded a new client, we deliberately overprovisioned our storage. Standing up new platforms was time-consuming, and we were tying up large amounts of capital in storage we often weren’t using.”

This approach was not sustainable, as Moore explains: “Our storage requirements were growing at 100% a year. Lots of the vendors in the market at the time were having supply chain problems, so it was impossible for us to get the kit we needed.”

After running proof-of-concepts with several world-leading storage vendors, the company selected Everpure for its mission-critical block workloads. 

Moore says: “We had an overwhelmingly positive proof of concept and came away feeling really, really good about Everpure as a company, its engineers, and how it engages with clients and partners. Long-term partnerships are about chemistry and communication, not necessarily technology. The firm you choose to partner with must have the right DNA and cultural fit, and Everpure ticked the boxes from the start.”

Moccia recalls: “Unlike other vendors we evaluated, the Everpure FlashArray™ solutions just worked, providing six nines of uptime and low-latency NVMe performance to deliver the reliability and performance our AI workloads demand.”

From a small deployment in its New York data center, Options quickly expanded its Everpure platform to support block storage use cases across its global business.

Moore confirms: “Over the course of a decade, the amount of data that we store on Everpure is going to increase between 10 to 20 times. The fact that we have a platform that lets us scale really easily, within a simple commercial model, is of huge value to us. If a client wants to trade in Singapore, for example, rather than having a two-year project to get the infrastructure in place, we can deliver and get them up and running in a few weeks with Everpure.”

For Options, the ability to consume storage as a service was another key reason for partnering with Everpure. With Evergreen//One, the company can harness the benefits of the Everpure Platform without up-front capital investment or complex infrastructure management.

“Evergreen//One completely solved our capacity planning challenges,” says Moccia. “We can now deploy storage anywhere in the world, consume it on a pay-as-you-go basis, and scale on demand—bringing down the barriers to global growth and flexing to meet the demands of rapidly evolving AI workloads.”

Moore explains: “The number one cornerstone of long-term success is how you manage technical debt. And that is effectively what Evergreen® does—it manages all the updates and new hardware. So, 20 years down the line, your infrastructure is still as fresh as it was when you started.”

Over the last seven years, Options has deployed a wide range of Everpure solutions to support innovative services for clients. Alongside high-performance Everpure FlashArray solutions, the company now uses FlashBlade//E™ solutions for market data and FlashBlade//S™ for performance-intensive analytics and AI. With its Unified Data Plane, the Everpure Platform ensures that archived market data is always available for analytics and AI workloads.

“Everpure FlashBlade//E enables us to store data much more cost-effectively than hyperscaler platforms,” comments Moccia. “FlashBlade® solutions were instrumental in creating Horizon, our private cloud platform for data science. Today, we enable users all over the world to build analytics and AI workflows using real-time market data from the Everpure Platform.”

Options has expanded rapidly, from a handful of data centers to more than 70 sites today. While the company’s global footprint is expanding, Everpure Fusion™ helps ensure that storage management stays lean and agile.

“Our Everpure fleet is growing and growing, and today we have arrays deployed all over the world,” says Moccia. “Earlier in our journey with Everpure, we were using our own tooling to manage each array independently. By introducing Everpure Fusion, we enabled unified fleet management capabilities. Fusion has delivered savings in the hundreds of hours per month across our infrastructure team, freeing engineers to focus on higher-value initiatives rather than routine storage management tasks.”

Moore elaborates: “Everpure Fusion is a single-pane-of-glass global management interface that allows you to manage dozens or hundreds of Everpure arrays. We’re adding new data centers almost every few months. If we were still using our previous storage system, that would have created an impossible amount of manual administration work. With Everpure Fusion, we are automating common storage management processes, reducing the workload for our global storage teams by around 80% and ensuring that growth is fast and simple.”

Information security and availability are essential for financial services organizations. With Everpure, Options can help ensure clients’ mission-critical services are always online.

“A dollar spent on preventing cyberattacks is going to save you at least a hundred dollars of loss down the line,” comments Moore. “That is assuming you survive the loss! Everpure gives us many safeguards to help ensure that we won’t be compromised in the first place.”

Moccia adds: “All our Everpure arrays are configured to create SafeMode™ Snapshots by default, which gives us immutable copies of our data. We also use ActiveDR™ to enhance our data resilience by continuously replicating data between our FlashArrays.”

External audits are business as usual for Options. The Everpure Platform allows the company to prove that its data protection capabilities are effective.

“We perform regular recovery tests for almost all our clients, which provides a great deal of reassurance about our capabilities,” says Moccia. “Everpure has an excellent reputation among our clients and prospects, which gives them peace of mind and helps us close new opportunities.”

While most of Options’ IT infrastructure is server-based, the company is rapidly expanding its use of containerized architectures. To help protect this fast-growing part of its environment, the company uses Portworx® to deliver persistent Kubernetes storage.

“Our container platform is becoming more important for both our disaster recovery [DR] and AI offerings,” adds Moccia. “For example, we have developed an in-house DR orchestrator that harnesses Everpure replication capabilities, which has proven to be a significant competitive differentiator. It enables us to deliver granular, high-performance replication and recovery options tailored to each client's requirements—something we simply couldn't offer at this level before.”

He continues: “Containerization is central to how we build and deliver modern services. Our cloud development and analytics platform, as well as our PrivateMind platform, rely heavily on containerized workloads. We recently acquired a Kubernetes and cloud-native specialist, and this has significantly deepened our containerization expertise and allowed us to accelerate delivery of scalable, portable workloads, with Everpure underpinning the persistent storage layer to ensure those environments perform reliably at scale. And because Portworx is infrastructure-agnostic, we can grow our container ecosystem on any infrastructure platform.”

Since starting its journey with Everpure, Options has transformed the reach and responsiveness of its business, and scalable, secure, and cost-effective storage has played an important part in its success.

“Compared to our legacy storage platform, we’ve boosted performance for key workloads by up to 80% while increasing availability from 95% to 100%,” says Moccia. “In the past, it would have taken over an hour to bring our systems back up after an outage. With ActiveDR, we can achieve near-zero RTO.”

Moore adds: “Over the last five years, there have been two waves where there have been huge supply chain issues across all of technology. Broadly speaking, Everpure has delivered seamlessly through both of those disruptions.”

The Everpure Platform has helped Options build innovative offerings for clients, including its Horizon data science platform. Recently, the company launched PrivateMind, a fully governed AI platform that empowers firms to deploy AI agents securely and drive AI-powered analytics.

Moccia comments: “Use cases like backtesting—testing the accuracy of predictive models using historical data—demand high-performance compute and low-latency petabyte storage. Everpure gives us the data foundation that makes services like Horizon and PrivateMind possible.”

As demand for AI takes off, Options wants to help clients unlock the full potential of the new technology while meeting their environmental sustainability objectives. Through a new geothermally powered data center in Iceland, the company is ready to feed growing appetites for AI-powered insight.

“In Iceland, the cost of power is a big factor, especially when you’re running AI environments continuously like us,” explains Moore. “The savings on power we make with Everpure will pay for all the hardware in our new Iceland data center within nine months and more than offset the cost of the hardware within 12 months, which is a remarkable outcome.”

Moccia adds: “Everpure has a close strategic partnership with NVIDIA, which perfectly aligns with our own AI objectives. On a practical level, Everpure FlashBlade technology is fully certified for the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD infrastructure in our new data center. This will be crucial, as it will allow us to feed data to our NVIDIA GPUs at the speed of demand.”

As Options continues to innovate, Everpure will be a key enabler for a new generation of AI, cloud, and security offerings.

“The Everpure architecture inherently supports more efficient AI infrastructure by reducing the physical footprint and cooling demands typically associated with high-performance storage,” concludes Moccia. “The Everpure concept of an Enterprise Data Cloud is completely in step with our vision for the future of storage at Options. In the years ahead, we will work with Everpure to create a unified, intelligently automated storage architecture that will support the next phase of our business growth journey.”