Waitrose has signed up to Pure Storage's FlashArrays to take the strain off its datacentre, speed up operations and offer more available space for the supermarket's Oracle-based workloads.
The flash storage is powering Waitrose's in-house demand forecasting application running on an SAS database, which previously ran on a spinning disk array, making processes very slow. The system combines data sources to predict customer shopping habits and when it will need to restock certain supplies, based on demand.
"With this information, we can accurately predict what stores will require to sell to customers. This directly drives our order fulfilment, and actively impacts what we send to stores," Aaron Denton, Infrastructure Development Manager at Waitrose, said.
With such large amounts of data to process and store, Waitrose needed to find a solution that would speed up the process of delivery, while also offering up more space.
"We're still early in our journey with Pure Storage, but we're very impressed by the way the company works and what its technology has done for our business. We want to build an ongoing relationship we're considering buying more storage in the short and long term."
Pure Storage added that using flash storage, its arrays were able to reduce Waitrose's datacaentre footprint by 75 per cent and it's future-proofed, unlike spinning disk technology that is also traditionally more costly.
"In today's digital world business success depends on being able to quickly analyse and access data. This is nowhere more relevant than the retail sector, which sees millions of customer engagements every single day," said Peter Gadd, Pure Storage's Director of Northern EMEA.
"Pure Storage was founded to fundamentally transform businesses while substantially reducing IT costs essentially storage that pays for itself. We're incredibly proud to be working with Waitrose and are eager to help them accelerate new possibilities in their business."
