City of Bloomington, IL Chooses Pure Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that the City of Bloomington, located in the heart of Central Illinois, is leveraging Pure Storage’s platform to drive financial flexibility, on-demand scale, and sustainability, while improving citizen services in the digital age.

Customer Challenge
Home to approximately 80,000 citizens, the City of Bloomington is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country and boasts a robust economy, resulting from a diverse mix of sectors – from manufacturing and medicine to education and entertainment, among others.

Due to fiscal challenges in the past, the city was forced to make strategic cutbacks that affected critical infrastructure investments, including storage systems. Over the course of a decade, the combination of expired storage system support contracts and makeshift solutions, like jump drives and low-cost arrays, added significant complexity to the city’s IT management and maintenance efforts.

The growing volume of public safety data, however, prompted a shift back to IT modernization leveraging Pure Storage’s reliable, efficient, and secure storage platform.

Customer Impact
Pure Storage, consumed via an Evergreen//Flex subscription, provides financial flexibility, simplicity, and performance to support the City of Bloomington’s delivery of critical citizen services.

Benefits include:

• Reduced Data Center Footprint: Pure Storage helps the City of Bloomington manage data growth to serve citizens in the digital age, without the added footprint. With Pure Storage, the City’s storage went from 48U to 7U in the data center, representing an 85% reduction. As a result, the City’s IT team gains greater efficiency to focus on other critical initiatives, including creating data retention policies and contributing to regional efforts to bolster the local economy through innovation.
• Flexible, Grow-as-you-Go Data Storage: Leveraging Pure Storage FlashArray via an Evergreen//Flex subscription gives the City of Bloomington the flexibility to pay only for the amount of storage used, with the advantages of on-premises storage ownership. The City has ongoing access to the latest hardware, monitored and managed 24/7 by Pure Storage. At the same time, the City has full visibility into its storage environment via the Pure1®AIOps management console.
• Faster Access to Critical Data: Public safety, including the increasing use of police body cameras, was driving exponential data growth for the City of Bloomington. However, with public safety videos residing on Pure Storage FlashArray, which is optimized for capacity, the City gains faster access to this critical safety data for its citizens. FlashArray also serves as the backup repository for Veeam, which the City uses together with SafeMode Snapshots for fast recovery in the event of a cyber (or physical) incident.
  

“Pure Storage has revolutionized our approach to IT with unparalleled flexibility, simplicity, and performance across our storage environment. It’s like pressing the ‘easy button,’ making everything better. With Pure Storage, we now carry the confidence of constant vigilance, providing significant peace of mind, while gaining the ability to effectively deliver and scale superior citizen services,” said Craig McBeath, director of IT, City of Bloomington.

Case Study: City of Bloomington Modernizes for the Data Age