Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Bottles Growth With Pure Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. replaced its legacy disk-based storage systems with its storage FlashArray 420 (FA-420) for improved data center performance and operational efficiency.

The brewery, which relies on performance-intensive applications to support its workforce and manufacturing processes, was experiencing severe production bottlenecks as its operations scaled. With the FlashArray deployed, Sierra Nevada’s production-critical applications and processes are able to fuel business growth as customer demand increases.

Founded in 1980, Sierra Nevada was among the first microbreweries in the US, and an early pioneer of the craft-brewing category. Today, it is among the Nation’s leading breweries, known for its full-flavored beers and commitment to sustainable business practices. The California-based company has been locally and nationally recognized for its carbon emission reduction efforts and use of solar and hydrogen fuel cells to power its manufacturing plants.

As Sierra Nevada grew into a marquee brand, its data grew with it, increasing at a rate of 30% annually. System performance and scalability presented a challenge as well, necessitating that the company expand the number of servers in its data center from 7 to 125. It soon began experiencing slowdowns in production performance, which stifled employee productivity. To counter this, Sierra Nevada implemented Exchange and a VDI, which only increased its application performance requirements, resulting in severe storage latency that impacted its production systems.

“Data infrastructure is the heart of our business – it’s what powers our production and manufacturing processes. Our control systems and data acquisition network connect nearly every device in our facility, digesting large amounts of data in real-time to ensure product quality,” said Justin Ainsworth, information systems manager, Sierra Nevada Brewing. “The performance and latency issues resulting from our legacy storage systems was making it difficult to scale our business and production processes to meet increases in customer demand.“

Realizing that these performance delays would continue and only worsen over time, Sierra Nevada’s IT team began researching all-flash storage alternatives. They selected the FlashArray 420 to optimize the company’s VDI environment, reduce latency and increase energy efficiency, while providing the company with a scalable infrastructure foundation. The performance results were immediate, reducing the company’s production latency to sub one millisecond from 300 milliseconds.

“Migrating to FlashArray enabled us to capture and store data reliably and much more efficiently, ultimately ensuring that our beer gets out the door in the most efficient, environmentally sustainable way possible,” said Ainsworth.

With its VDI and production systems benefiting from Sierra Nevada’s FlashArray deployment, the company’s IT team opted to migrate its Exchange environment as well. With Pure Storage’s Forever Flash program, Ainsworth and his team were able to upgrade the capacity of its 420 controllers, resulting in a data reduction ratio of 4.5 to 1, and condensing their data footprint from 35TB to 7.5TB. Further, Sierra Nevada has saved more than $200,000 in hardware upgrades and reduced its associated energy costs by 90%.

“Pure Storage exceeded all of our performance expectations and sliced our data center footprint by more than half. This has helped us to dramatically reduce energy consumption related to our IT processes,” said Ainsworth. “With the significant decrease in our data center resource requirements, our renewable energy sources can now support 76% of our total power consumption, and that number will only continue to rise with FlashArray.“

“Sierra Nevada’s use case exemplifies the scalability and performance benefits that all-flash provides for fast growth businesses grappling with the latent inefficiencies of legacy disk storage systems,” said Matt Kixmoeller, VP of products, Pure Storage. “FlashArray not only eradicated latency and performance bottlenecks for Sierra Nevada, but it also enabled them to streamline manufacturing processes and further reduce their carbon footprint. This is a great example of how Forever Flash has enabled Sierra Nevada to continue on its high-growth path with seamless upgrades and lower maintenance costs over time.“

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