St. Petersburg FL Deploys Pure Storage

St. Petersburg, FL, the second largest city in the Tampa Bay region, is transforming city operations and improving crime-fighting systems with Pure Storage, Inc.

The Pure Storage all-flash solution also helped the city prepare for the arrival of Hurricane Irma in September 2017.

St. Petersburg was an early adopter of virtualization technology, investing heavily in server and desktop virtualization infrastructures. The benefits were significant, but by 2016, the city’s VDI was experiencing performance problems caused by a storage system that could not keep pace with demands generated by 1,200 virtual desktop users. This latency caused delays for citizens and city employees, including public safety professionals.

Since embracing flash storage and migrating to Pure, city employees and citizens experience faster response times for essential applications and Web-based services. Launch times for the most widely used applications were cut in half, improving productivity and the ‘customer experience’ for residents.

In addition, the Police Department deployed Pure as the foundation for an improved crime-fighting system utilizing business-intelligence (BI) analytics. The city deployed FlashArray to support police Public Safety Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) and automated Records Management Systems (RMS), implementing a new geographic information system (GIS) that fees data to a new BI application. Previously, the department could not upgrade its BI and GIS applications because of storage latency.

The Police Department also saw performance gains on day-to-day applications. It has cut the time for a large SQL report that it runs every Monday from more than 30 minutes down to less than a minute. In addition, St. Petersburg’s IT department is saving hundreds of person-hours a year previously devoted to storage management.

“Pure Storage means more productivity, more satisfied end-users, better DR and less downtime,” said Rock Mitich, senior server analyst, city of St. Petersburg. “And, we’re prepared for continued growth with data reduction rates between 5.5:1 and 6:1. We now have adequate capacity to handle long-term growth in data volumes, without costly purchases of new equipment.“

In addition, St. Petersburg has future-proofed its infrastructure with Pure’s Evergreen Storage program, which guarantees customers ongoing upgrades to the latest technology with preservation of previous investment.

“With the Evergreen business model, you have non-disruptive refresh cycles built right in. That’s future-proofing with real value,” said David McLean, computer operations manager, city disaster preparedness.

The performance of the FlashArray was a benefit during preparations for Hurricane Irma in September 2017. As the city prepared for the storm, it faced the possibility of having to shut down its secondary data center and move all production systems to its primary data center. The team wanted to keep as many virtual desktop machines and servers running as possible, so it fully loaded the FlashArray hours before the storm arrived, and the platform performed flawlessly – optimizing availability of vital applications even during the emergency.