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Australian Rugby Union chooses Pure Storage all-flash array as backbone of national shared-services environment

Storage platform plays pivotal role in achieving core business goals for the ARU Data volume reduced by 80% and data centre footprint down by 75%

SYDNEY, Australia – May 16, 2014 — Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage array company, today announced the Australian Rugby Union (ARU) has implemented Pure Storage FlashArray as the backbone of a new IT deployment to enable a more efficient and cost-effective shared-services environment.

The ARU, the national body of Rugby in Australia, is responsible for the growth and development of the game from junior players through to the elite level.

The ARU selected Pure Storage for its high performance and reliability, administration and management simplicity, ability to reduce data stores, small physical size and overall cost-effectiveness.

Nick Payne, IT Infrastructure Manager for the ARU, said, “Our ability to share services with our state divisions and member unions around the country is critical to our business operation. They rely on our services for their core business functions such as CMS, team management tools and substantial amounts of video content for coaching resources. This means our central services need to be performing at peak levels around the clock. At the same time, we need a solution which is simple to manage and maintain, and cost-effective in the long term.”

The ARU employs data scientists to analyse game and player videos, which are then made available for sharing across the network via a centralised archive. Each week can comprise up to eight games and each game can have up to eight camera feeds, generating high levels of video footage for analysis, storage and sharing.

Prior to implementing the Pure Storage FlashArray, the ARU’s legacy SAN was a mechanical disk-based environment. Payne said, “We were running out of storage space, functionality was less-than optimal and ongoing maintenance was expensive, so we decided to look for alternative options.”

After evaluating full-disk products, disk-flash hybrid offerings and flash-only solutions, the ARU chose the Pure Storage FlashArray.

“After just a few weeks of use, the benefits we’re experiencing with the new Pure Storage FlashArray are outstanding,” said Payne. “Our data storage requirements have dropped from 52TB to just 10.5TB thanks to Pure’s data reduction capabilities. Hand-in-hand with this is the fact we’ve dropped our physical space requirements from half a rack (around 20 rack unit/RUs) to just four RUs, which in turn saves power in our data centre.”

“The Pure unit is easy to manage and maintain, which translates into tangible savings for the organisation.”

The ARU worked with Pure Storage integration partner, Solista, to design and implement the solution.

Noel Allnutt, Managing Director of Solista, said, “Our approach is to provide our customers with technologies to generate genuine, long-term benefits for their business. This simple methodology is designed to pinpoint key business issues and solve them quickly, with simple, smart, disruptive solutions.”

Allnutt added, “In the case of the ARU, Nick and his team saw the vast benefits of Pure’s all-flash solution immediately: from the speed and simplicity of deployment to the reduction in footprint, to lower costs.”

Michael Alp, Vice President APJ for Pure Storage, said, “The ARU is a great example of a customer reaping the business benefits of swapping from old fashioned mechanical disks to an all-flash array solution. With customers in the market searching for greater scalability, simplicity and efficiency from their storage environment, all-flash eliminates the need for complex, expensive disks, making it the obvious choice to provide results from the get-go and for the long term.”

About Pure Storage

Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage company, enables the broad deployment of flash in the data centre. When compared to traditional disk-centric arrays, Pure Storage all-flash enterprise arrays are 10x faster and 10x more space and power efficient at a price point that is less than performance disk per gigabyte stored. The Pure Storage FlashArray is ideal for high performance workloads, including server virtualisation, desktop virtualisation (VDI), database (OLTP, real-time analytics) and cloud computing. For more information, visit www.purestorage.com.

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The Pure Storage and “P” logo marks, Purity Operating Environment, and RAID-3D are trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. All other trademarks or names referenced in this document are the property of their respective owners.

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Media Contact
Kara Jecks
Max Australia
purestorage@maxaustralia.com.au
6 1 2 9469 5740

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