Mississippi Keeps State Revenue Streams Flowing

The Mississippi Department of Revenue (DOR) collects more than $10 billion in annual revenue to fund critical services for the state. The department successfully migrated tax collection and motor vehicle applications to the Pure Storage platform, using FlashStack converged infrastructure from Pure Storage and Cisco. They enabled Pure Fusion, which connects their arrays together, simplifying management as their environment grows. The department also selected FlashBlade to simplify backups, protect against data loss, and power an increasing number of file and object storage applications. Combined with proactive system monitoring and support from Pure1, the technology is a powerful way to keep the DOR up and running—and growing.

Part of Mickey Yates’s job as CIO of the Mississippi Department of Revenue is overseeing applications that serve taxpayers and businesses in 82 counties. These include MARS, the state’s tax-collection system, which supports a taxpayer portal and allows liquor stores to order alcohol; and MARVIN, the motor-vehicle registration system used by auto dealers and county vehicle-registration offices.

To protect the data in MARS and MARVIN, Yates and his team are constantly backing up and restoring the SQL databases to ensure they never lose a bit of information as employees, taxpayers, and businesses across the state use the systems. But at 12TB of data, backups were increasingly unreliable.

“To be blunt, it was a nightmare,” says Yates. “We tried several products, but we had nightly backup failures.”

Mike Dehaan, Infrastructure Services Manager and Enterprise Architect at DOR, also felt the pressure. “It has a direct impact on the bottom line of the state when we’re down. So having a platform like Pure in place where we can do things like non-disruptive upgrades—it lines up with our roadmap.” he explains.

Looking for a backup solution, Yates already had an idea of what he wanted. A few years ago, he migrated MARS and MARVIN to the FlashStack converged infrastructure solution—creating a much faster, smoother experience for state employees, taxpayers, liquor stores, and auto dealerships. On MARS alone, a study showed that faster response times saved the DOR a combined 39.5 hours of staff time every day.

“When we moved to Pure for the tax system, we actually saved 39.5 hours a day. We were seeing more effective data migrations and movement, that we are able to spend more time developing code and less time waiting for recoveries,” says Dehaan.

When backup became an issue, Yates turned to Pure FlashBlade to take advantage of its long-term cost-of-ownership benefits and central point of management—simplifying backups for his network engineers.

“Backups have become an afterthought—not even a blip on the radar anymore. With Pure Storage, it just works,” shares Yates.

FlashBlade handles full nightly backups to protect against data loss. It enables snapshots every 15 minutes, allowing point-in-time restores if needed. And it supports weekly restores for staging, testing, and development environments, giving teams the space to perform upgrades and testing without affecting production.

Dehaan agrees: “Now that we're on the FlashBlade side of the house, it has directly increased our time to market for production code changes—for implementing things like tax code and warehousing changes”.

Combined with the proactive system monitoring and support the Mississippi DOR gets from Pure, the technology is a powerful way to keep the systems up and running. Now, they have implemented Pure Fusion which seamlessly connects their storage arrays, streamlining management as their environment expands.

“The data needs of our business units have triggered an explosive chain reaction of 1,800% data growth since bringing Pure into our environments,” exclaims Dehaan. “Pure has been able to run those workloads well and Fusion is driving our infrastructure team to operate more nimbly and effectively than ever, despite increasing demands on our resources.”

 “I don’t think I can overstate the value of Pure technology and the Pure team,” says Yates. “It’s a relationship you don’t necessarily get with other vendors, and the peace of mind makes it one of the best products on the market.”