BVRD is a private company that manages organized markets where negotiations of financial instruments that are listed in the Stock Market are carried out. It also offers services related to technological solutions that promote greater access, liquidity, and democratization of targeted investments, mainly to financial institutions, institutional investors, large corporations, and the general public.
The services offered, both as Market Infrastructure and as a provider of technological solutions, address many aspects of the value chain of the markets and instruments traded on the Stock Exchange, contemplating Variable Income (investment fund quotas, trust shares, and shares), Fixed Income (corporate and government bonds).
As part of a new strategic initiative, BVRD began searching for a new hyperconverged infrastructure solution that would allow them to maximize and optimize their technological infrastructure and strengthen security controls in the different virtualization layers. BVRD chose Nutanix as a solution provider due to its scalability potential, extensive experience in hyperconverged technologies, and good references. Since implementing Nutanix, BVRD has been satisfied with the ease and speed of its implementation and has benefited from the level of availability, performance of the solution, and its ease of scalability.
| Speed and ease of implementation Fast and flawless implementation of the hyperconverged infrastructure with Nutanix customer support present throughout the entire process. | Level of availability Infrastructure offers 100% availability through maximized uptime and simple recovery procedures in the event of downtime. |
| Optimum performance The infrastructure offers a level of performance that responds to the needs and response times expected in demanding processes such as those that characterize a capital market. | Ease of scalability Flexibility and scalability offer the opportunity to seamlessly add additional nodes as need demands it. |
We just started working with Nutanix in January of this year, which gives you a strong indication of how fast the implementation was conducted, and was truly flawless. The speed of this implementation exceeded our expectations, achieving a process with successful results.
Within the financial market infrastructure, BVRD offers the services of listing fixed-income and variable-income instruments, negotiation, registration, data disclosure, and sale of information, as well as courses, seminars, and training activities for issuers, investors, intermediaries, and the general public.
As a provider of technological solutions, BVRD offers trading terminals, connectivity for routing and direct market access (DMA), price inquiry terminals, and historical information.
Oscar Rodriguez, Technology Director at BVRD, leads and manages technological strategy for the company. He’s responsible for analyzing the synergy between government, business, and information technologies.
Abraham Rosario, Technology Manager at BVRD, occupies an operational role in the IT department in which he’s responsible for the day-to-day management of the different technology continuity management sectors, including infrastructure, security, and development.
As one of the most innovative company leaders in the market with international recognition for the evolution achieved in recent years, BVRD launched a strategic plan at the beginning of this year to boost their decision-making through 2027. Within the strategic plan, there is a key pillar for technological development focused on supplying solutions with the application of new technologies that provide operational efficiency, better response times, and higher levels of security.
As a part of this strategic initiative, Oscar, Abraham, and their team began looking for a new hyperconverged infrastructure solution that would provide better levels of availability of the infrastructure, efficient disaster recovery procedures, greater ability to create laboratory environments for development testing purposes from productive environments and optimize security controls at the node level.
“The main problem was that we needed to achieve better levels of availability of our infrastructure,” details Oscar. “Availability is key for our market because there is no room for error in our transactions. We also needed to implement more efficient disaster recovery procedures because business continuity and disaster recovery times are very demanding in our industry due to the immediacy which transactions must occur and the demand for a low level of latency. We were looking for a solution that would help us reach an availability level of 99.9999% and allow us to recover extremely quickly if a disaster did strike.”
BVRD had another hyperconverged infrastructure technology but wanted to improve the level of security controls at the node level, as well as the ability to address potential security breaches efficiently.
These limitations and the opportunities for improvement led them to seek out a new hyperconverged infrastructure as a part of their 2023-2027 strategic planning initiatives. They found the solution that would help them achieve their objectives in Nutanix.
BVRD chose Nutanix for multiple reasons, but one of the most important was the solution’s scalability. “By 2025, all of the projects within our strategic planning will have multiplied, and we’ll need to scale up our infrastructure. Unlike having to make an abrupt change to a different provider as we have in years past, Nutanix will allow us to easily add two, three, or four more nodes due to its high flexibility and scalability,” explains Oscar.
In addition to the scalability, BVRD was drawn to the capabilities offered by Nutanix when compared to other hyperconverged solutions. They were also encouraged in their decision by the references of different companies in the financial sector and others that had found success with Nutanix.
“Through our contacts in the Dominican Republic, we were able to obtain references that gave us the endorsement of the entire Nutanix cycle from the agile and successful implementation process to a high level of satisfaction with the utilization and ongoing support from Nutanix,” details Oscar.
Currently, BVRD has implemented Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure for their company. They are working with AHV and managing the entire environment with Nutanix Prism Element as a comprehensive solution.
The BVRD workloads running on Nutanix include their RP, BackOffice, security tools for infrastructure monitoring and control purposes, file server, databases, backup solutions, active directory, monitoring tools and audit, as well as multiple development environments and tests.
Regarding specific databases and software, BVRD utilizes Microsoft Dynamics, SQL Server, Veeam Backup, ManageEngine Suite, Trellix, and SIEM under the Rapid Seven vendor—which is hosted more than 60% on the Nutanix platform.
BVRD has been extremely satisfied by the speed and ease of implementation of the Nutanix solution, especially considering the complex makeup of the product.
“We just started working with Nutanix in January of this year, completing the process in the month of February, which gives you a strong indication of just how fast and efficient the implementation and the migration of environments was conducted,” explains Oscar. “The success and speed of this implementation is better than any experience I’ve ever had with other manufacturers.”
Additionally, BVRD felt well supported by Nutanix and their local implementation partner, Velocity. “We asked Nutanix to present us with options of their top three local implementation partners for us to choose from, and we decided to work directly with Velocity,” details Abraham. “In addition to Velocity, we also felt 100% supported by the Nutanix team, who was invested in making the implementation successful, and it was.”
“Through our high-level support from day zero, BVRD was able to see first-hand how our unique implementation process allows us to quickly and seamlessly migrate workloads for our clients,” adds Jonathan Pache, Territory Manager at Nutanix. “They also chose Velocity to help with the migration, which is one of our most trusted partners, so it made the process even more seamless.”
Since implementing Nutanix, BVRD has benefitted from more quickly and easily provisioning new resources to launch new products that require a server architecture and database.
“Before Nutanix, it used to take me four hours to do this. Now, it’s only taking an hour for new architectures and laboratories and this is a key function for us for all the security challenges that exist today,” details Abraham. “It also helps us with the reduction of human errors because there are automatic processes that are already predefined. The agility that we have in moving from our main data center to our contingency data center has also been vital for us in this evaluation and selection.”
Utilizing Nutanix has also provided BVRD with maximum uptime. “Although the Nutanix implementation is recent, we already have 100% availability in the months that the infrastructure is in production,” shares Oscar. “We also know that if a failure does occur, the recovery procedures are simpler, which gives us more peace of mind.”
The high availability provided by Nutanix is extremely valuable for BVRD considering what’s at stake for them in terms of potential downtime. “In addition to the risks of financial and reputational loss, downtime also poses a systemic risk because we are an essential part of the market infrastructure in the Dominican Republic,” continues Oscar. “Inactivity would also bring compliance issues from regulatory standards of the stock market and with our participants, which is why disaster recovery from Nutanix has been so valuable for our business continuity plan.”
Oscar and Abraham have also enjoyed Nutanix’s high-level customer support throughout implementation. “Migrating a data center is not a simple process. A migration like this entails a series of additional operational challenges and risks, but with the involvement of Nutanix and their support, we did not face any issues,” explains Abraham. “During the implementation process, the Nutanix support staff also took the time to transfer their knowledge of the software to our team, which is vital to our long-term success in utilizing Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure.”
Overall, BVRD has been extremely satisfied with the Nutanix implementation and the utilization of the solution. “All of the promises that were made during the sales process—the quality of the staff, the support, the solution itself—were completely followed through and directly corresponds to what we saw in presentations,” shares Oscar. “We really appreciate Nutanix’s ability to achieve the ideal configuration of the solution that was highly adapted to us and our operational, technological, and financial needs.”
“Nutanix offers us a robust platform that allows us a more agile provision of resources to respond to our accelerated business strategy that requires a fast materialization,” concludes Oscar. “The solution gives us a guarantee of service continuity, a high level of resilience, and better security controls that benefit participants. It allows us to comply with requirements established and supervised by the Superintendence of the Stock Market.”
“Due to our recent experience with Nutanix, we are sure that in the future, we will experience more benefits and new functionalities,” says Abraham. “We are certain of this because we’ve learned in just a short amount of time about all of the efforts that Nutanix makes in terms of research and development to continually expand the solutions of their components.”
In the future, BVRD plans to further expand the utilization of Nutanix solutions. “We have been looking at cloud integration through a series of add-ons with the Nutanix technical team as well as expansion in the number of nodes in the future,” says Abraham. “As we learn more about other Nutanix benefits and add-ons, we’ll consider other expansion measures that will benefit our company.”