Bringing Car Sales into the Digital Era

AutoNation is transforming the automotive retail experience through a highly differentiated sales and service model – both in its stores and online. AutoNation Express lets customers browse car inventory and complete an entire purchase, lease, or trade-in transaction in just minutes. This popular application relies on sales and service transaction data on thousands of vehicles and from millions of customers. To manage this high volume of data and enable digital customers to never step foot in a dealership, AutoNation uses fast, reliable storage from Pure Storage.

AutoNation provides new and pre-owned vehicle sales and service at more than 350 U.S. locations, online, and through its store-to-door delivery model. The auto retailer wanted to differentiate by providing customers with an end-to-end, digital sales and service experience, and needed to improve its storage performance to do so. The new storage needed to be flexible to meet rising customer demands at a predictable cost and avoid disruptions commonly associated with storage upgrades. The transformation project shifted into high gear when the pandemic hit and showrooms closed.

AutoNation conducts almost half of all business online and IT staff spends less time maintaining storage, using Pure1 to manage its entire VMware environment including disaster recovery. Transactions revved up, with 1,200 to 1,600 additional cars sold monthly. All workloads including its unique Equity Mining Tool and CRM run at full speed on Pure Storage FlashArray//X™ and FlashBlade®, and the Pure Storage Evergreen//Forever™ subscription ensures non-disruptive upgrades. AutoNation can scale its storage infrastructure quickly to support new application development with a predictable cost model for storage.