Scottish Government deploys Pure Storage to support Agricultural & Rural Economy Directorate VDI environment

All-flash array storage has slashed build times for developers and cut downtime

The Scottish Government's Agricultural & Rural Economy Directorate has fleshed out its storage capacity with Pure Storage arrays in a bid to rescue a struggling VDI environment that had grown to more than 400 users.

The Directorate was losing development time as its existing storage infrastructure was struggling to cope with its growing VDI environment.

The storage implementation, though, helped to streamline the VDI environment, with the Directorate moving one of its flash arrays to its virtual server infrastructure in order to support data replication and recovery.

Since the implementation of the all-flash arrays from Pure Storage, the organisation claims that developer build times have been halved, disaster recovery simplified and upgrade costs significantly reduced.

"We play an important role in the rural economy and supporting Scottish farmers. We can't have any delay in processing claims and getting money to the farmers," said Neill Smith, head of IT infrastructure at the Directorate.

It pays out some £750 million in subsidies every year, and any downtime could cause delays in payments to farmers.

According to Neill, the VDI environment was suffering from increased latency as the number of staff - and, therefore, users - grew. This was having a particular impact on developers within the organisation.

"Imagine a developer does four builds a day and each takes 30 minutes," said Smith. "But swap your old storage solution for an all-flash array and it only takes 15. That's a time saving of at least an hour per day per developer. Multiply that by one hundred developers and you can see how significant that time saving becomes."

Following a proof-of-concept study, the Smith decided to go with an all-flash array and opened a tender attracting bids from multiple vendors.

The array was actually installed back in 2015, making the Directorate Pure Storage's first Scottish customer. Since the initial deployment in 2015, the Directorate has tested Pure flash arrays for other applications, such as snapshot cloning, and has upgraded its FA405 arrays to the M20 models.

Today, it runs all-flash arrays in both of its data centres, with fail over and replication features.