British Army builds a resilient digital backbone

The British Army uses its Army Hosting Environment (AHE) to support mission-critical applications, including virtual desktops, Oracle databases, and GEOINT systems. Faced with ageing infrastructure and limited performance, the Army chose Pure Storage to build an evergreen, AI-ready platform with nondisruptive upgrades and scalable performance. Over six years, the Army grew its storage footprint fivefold with zero outages, eliminated tech debt, and modernised its data protection with Veeam. The solution supports a unified data platform, enabling predictive modelling, secure communications, and ESG-aligned efficiency. With Pure Storage, the Army is now equipped with a resilient foundation ready for future mission demands.

The British Army hosts mission-critical applications in its Army Hosting Environment (AHE). This capability provides the Army’s bespoke business environment and forms a critical part of the assured data fabric necessary to generate the Army’s war-fighting capability.

In order to deliver the performance, security, and high availability required to fulfil the demanding requirements of these applications, the Army requires the highest performing, most resilient, evergreen data platform enabled for the needs of today and tomorrow.

Six years ago, the Army’s data storage environment was underperforming. The legacy infrastructure lacked resilience, suffered from regular hardware failures, consumed excessive energy, and couldn’t scale or integrate with modern systems or external data sources. It lacked API integration and couldn't support key workloads such as VDI. The Army faced weekly hardware failures, constant refresh cycles, and an inability to support performance-sensitive applications like high-resolution satellite imagery and GEOINT systems.

“Most of the applications using the Army Hosting Environment suffered from lack of storage performance,” the team reported. Latency especially impacted the Oracle Enterprise Database suite, creating queues that disrupted the user experience. Their GEOINT application experienced such severe buffering that it became unusable at critical moments.

The Army wanted to break out of the traditional refresh cycle and create a true evergreen, AI-ready data platform capable of delivering a secure, highly resilient, interoperable digital backbone.

Determined to break free from the legacy refresh cycle and technology obsolescence, the Army chose Pure Storage to build an evergreen, AI-ready data platform. Recognised as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Primary Storage and with a Net Promoter Score consistently above 81, Pure Storage brought both market validation and customer trust to the engagement.

“Pure Storage’s performance and energy efficiency is game changing,” said Col. Mark ‘Chopsey’ Cornell, who led the modernisation effort from the beginning. Neil Symons, Lead Cloud Solutions Architect for AHE, added: “Pure is the first thing we’ve ever bought that actually delivers what it says on the glossy brochure.”

Pure Storage was selected after a rigorous Ministry of Defence (MOD)-led competition and has since become a strategic data platform partner. The Army now runs FlashBlade//S, FlashArray//C, and FlashBlade//X, alongside Evergreen//Forever, to support high-performance workloads while enabling nondisruptive upgrades across the platform.

Since their partnership with Pure Storage began, the Army has completed its first set of nondisruptive upgrades and expanded its storage estate by a factor of five, cementing a long-term strategic relationship with Pure Storage. “Pure Storage has consistently delivered on performance without a single outage in the six years we have used it,” said Col. Bob Christopher, Head of ADS.

The AHE now runs on an evergreen, AI-ready data platform that has eliminated the concept of end-of-life and costly data migrations. Performance and functionality improvements are delivered seamlessly through every software release. This architecture supports AI, large language models (LLMs), and machine learning model training for disconnected systems, enabling predictive analysis of threats and logistics optimisation—all in a cost-effective, sustainable, and seamless way.

Operationally, the Army has achieved a 40% to 50% reduction in data centre power usage while minimising e-waste, supporting sustainability goals and reducing its carbon footprint. The Evergreen subscription model has allowed the Army to avoid costly hardware replacements and reduce long-term IT expenditure.

Interoperability is ensured through REST API support, eliminating data silos across systems. Storage efficiency has improved significantly, with an 18:1 data reduction ratio in VDI environments and a 60% lower total cost of ownership. These efficiencies have reduced the Army’s data centre footprint by 80%, driving down energy consumption while supporting ESG commitments.

Performance has also been transformed. Oracle ETL jobs now complete 4 to 6 hours earlier, improving service responsiveness. Geospatial data processing is 10 times faster, supporting real-time intelligence and operational planning. Submillisecond latency ensures mission-critical data is always accessible. During the pandemic, VDI usage increased dramatically, but Pure Storage infrastructure absorbed the demand without disruption.

Security remains a top priority. The Army uses KMIP-based encryption key management to safeguard classified data, with zero-impact, data-at-rest encryption that protects without compromising speed. The intuitive Pure Storage interface means training is optional—removing over-reliance on specialist expertise and streamlining day-to-day management.

The Army consciously chose to invest in best-of-breed suppliers to unlock data silos, create an AI-ready environment, and avoid the inherent limitations of a single vendor lock-in. To that end, they brought Cisco and Veeam into the supplier ecosystem. The net result was a step change in performance, true application interoperability, and operational surety—a secure, highly performant evergreen platform built for the future.

Having the right data strategy and investing in the right AI-ready data platform is critical in creating the optimum data fabric—across core, edge, and cloud—to enable innovation and secure accessibility.

By adopting Pure Storage, the British Army has created a modern, AI-ready, and highly secure digital platform. The platform provides rapid data access, enabling immediately actionable insights while improving cost efficiency and sustainability. The Pure Evergreen architecture delivers continuous innovation for the Army, removes disruptive hardware refresh cycles, reduces e-waste, and optimises long-term IT costs.

This partnership has future-proofed the Army’s investment and paves the way for future AI requirements, edge deployments (leveraging Pure’s high-density infrastructure), and cloud adoption using Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated.