Fueling the Future of Work with Flash-powered Data, AI

People are at the heart of every organization—from the smallest business to the largest enterprise. Paylocity was founded with this concept at its core, and today provides more than 36,000 clients across a span of industries with reliable payroll and human capital management (HCM) support. 

Paylocity stands apart from its many competitors with an award-winning, cloud-based platform that helps clients manage their payroll, benefits, time tracking, talent management, and employee experience needs. Its solutions draw data from a massive database farm that powers its platforms. To provide clients and their employees with the fastest and most reliable performance, Paylocity relies on the Pure Storage platform to power its offerings, including its popular mobile app. 

“Pure Storage helps us maintain reliable app performance even when facing high loads during our busiest times of the year,” says David Pinkawa, Engineering Manager at Paylocity. “We couldn’t do it without Pure.”

Data growth at Paylocity has exploded as more companies move away from manual processes and adopt digital HCM practices. To this end, Pure Storage plays a critical role in Paylocity’s hybrid cloud ecosystem, providing all the company’s on-premises storage and handling mission-critical data and workloads. 

“We’re constantly discussing data retention at Paylocity because databases keep growing," says Pinkawa. "Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud platform helps us maintain a balance of scale with strong performance.”

For maximum scalability, Paylocity stores all data from its virtualization environment and its databases on Pure Storage FlashArray//XL™. The company maintains database logs on FlashBlade®—the only option with the lightning-fast write speeds that database administrators expect to meet internal SLAs. 

The Pure Storage platform also serves as the storage of choice for large language models (LLM), driving performance and delivering cost efficiency for up-and-coming artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives. These include tone-checking and personalized learning to help customers work more effectively.

Additional FlashArray//X™ units configured in the FlashStack® architecture, which combines the Pure Storage platform and Cisco UCS, hosts parts of the production environment such as boot volumes and operating system drives for scale and performance. “We consistently achieve sub-millisecond latency with FlashArray, which helps make our applications much more performant,” says Pinkawa. “This gives our clients the fast, responsive experiences they expect with our app.”

Paylocity clients can’t afford to have payroll and HCM apps go offline. With Pure, it has confidence that data will be available. Purity ActiveCluster™ synchronizes loads across FlashArray units to keep data accessible. With a Pure Storage Evergreen//Forever™ subscription, Paylocity has successfully completed 259 non-disruptive software upgrades and 58 non-disruptive hardware upgrades—eliminating downtime while allowing the company to maintain a modern storage architecture. These self-service upgrades provide Paylocity with the flexibility and autonomy to initiate, monitor, and complete upgrades on their own schedule, keeping their infrastructure up to date while letting the team focus on key priorities.

With Pure1®, the team can monitor information from load metrics to software lifecycles for the entire Pure environment from a single interface. “Pure1 features such as capacity planning are helpful when adding a new database so that we can balance loads and maintain strong performance for all of our clients,” says Pinkawa.

Pure’s contributions extend to optimizing Paylocity's data center efficiency, supporting everything from minimizing storage requirements to cutting power consumption. These efforts collectively contribute to reducing Paylocity's carbon footprint, a crucial focus for the company.

“We have a lot of engineers who can definitely sleep more comfortably at night, because that technology is rock solid," says Pinkawa. "We've had a really good impression with Pure Storage.”