In-house Waitrose app running on much more efficient hardware
London, UK – July 18, 2016 — Pure Storage, the market’s leading independent solid-state array vendor, has announced that Waitrose is using its FlashArray technology, reducing its datacentre footprint by 75 per cent. With flash storage, Waitrose benefits from increased speed, overall improved storage performance and extra usable storage space, which it has already used for additional Oracle workloads.
Waitrose, a major UK supermarket chain with 346 stores and 60,000 employees, runs an in-house demand forecasting application using a SAS database. It uses information from various sources to make predictions on the groceries Waitrose stores need to stock to fulfill customer demand. It does this by tracking various sets of data – for example, it can look at weather patterns over the last few years, as well as sales, dates and events.
Aaron Denton, Infrastructure Development Manager at Waitrose, said, "With this information we can accurately predict what stores will require to sell to customers. This directly drives our order fulfillment, and actively impacts what we send to stores."
The application runs using a heavy AIX operating system. Previously there were major issues using a spinning disk array for this process, but with two Pure Storage FlashArrays the app is running on much more efficient hardware, leveraging the amount of capacity that Waitrose wants to dedicate.
Denton added, “We’re still early in our journey with Pure Storage, but we’re very impressed by the way the company works and what its technology has done for our business. We want to build an ongoing relationship – we’re considering buying more storage in the short and long term.”
Flash storage provides fast speeds and a small datacentre footprint, removing complexity in Waitrose’s day-to-day storage activity. Also, Forever Flash and Evergreen storage means that when it does need upgrading, it doesn’t mean the costly implementations of the past that came with spinning disk technology.
“In today’s digital world business success depends on being able to quickly analyse and access data. This is nowhere more relevant than the retail sector, which sees millions of customer engagements every single day,” said Peter Gadd, Pure Storage’s Director of Northern EMEA. “Pure Storage was founded to fundamentally transform businesses while substantially reducing IT costs – essentially storage that pays for itself. We’re incredibly proud to be working with Waitrose and are eager to help them accelerate new possibilities in their business.”
About Pure Storage
Pure Storage (NYSE:PSTG) accelerates possible, transforming businesses in ways previously unimagined. The company’s disruptive, software-driven storage technology combined with a customer-friendly business model drives business and IT transformation for customers through dramatic increases in performance and efficiency at lower costs. Pure Storage FlashArray//m is simpler, faster and more elegant than any other technology in the datacenter. FlashArray//m is ideal for the move toward big data and for performance-intensive workloads such as cloud computing, database systems, desktop virtualization, real-time analytics and server virtualization. With Pure's industry leading Satmetrix-certified NPS score of 79, Pure customers are some of the happiest in the world, and include large and mid-size organizations across a range of industries: cloud-based software and service providers, consumer web, education, energy, financial services, governments, healthcare, manufacturing, media, retail and telecommunications. With Pure Storage, companies push the boundaries of what's possible to become faster, smarter and more innovative.
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