Flash Storage Meets Growth Demands

Customer:

For digital cinema company Arts Alliance Media, storage is incredibly important – it has around 30,000 cinema screens around the world from which it needs to pull data that allows the software it builds to function. Spinning disks couldn’t do the job – only flash has the performance needed to process its information. Arts Alliance Media chose Pure Storage’s enterprise flash array, with fantastic results that has saved the company around £1 million.

Challenges:

• Managing massive amounts of global customer data
• Existing spinning disk technology wasn’t matching requirements
• Only flash had the potential to match Alliance Media’s demands for high performance, availability and ease of management
• With the required workloads, hybrid disk performance from Dell was ‘terrible’

Use Case:

• Microsoft SQL databases and web apps

Business Transformation:

• Providing the power needed to cope with massive customer data demands from 30,000 cinema screens around the world, saving around £1 million

IT Transformation:

• Significant cost savings from energy expenditure
• Some applications run 150 times faster than previously, resulting in increased financial productivity and a reduction in administration and maintenance
• Deduplication means Arts Alliance Media can handle more data without having to increase the amount of flash storage, decreasing its storage cost
• SQL databases no longer require periodic restarts, saving time and money spent on IT support