Room & Board Selects Pure Storage for Business Operations Makeover

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the market's leading independent solid-state array vendor, today announced that modern American-made home furnishings retailer Room & Board has deployed Pure Storage to address increasing demands placed on its IT systems and to keep the company's critical applications functioning efficiently through substantial growth.

With Pure Storage, Room & Board has improved processes around sales reporting, financial analysis and delivery planning. Key applications execute without interruption, ensuring more efficient business operations throughout the company, while simultaneously allowing the IT department to achieve greater productivity without increased headcount or budget.

While running its IT applications on a spinning disk system, Room & Board found its commitment to high quality threatened by the limitations of legacy storage. Routine SAP queries dragged down performance for end-users throughout the company and critical analytics reports could only run when IT systems had available capacity. As the company grew, those limitations became unsustainable.

Since deploying Pure, running nightly scheduling application has gone from five-to-seven hours, to two. Key sales reports that used to take an hour each can now be completed in less than two minutes, while Citrix log-in times for hundreds of users was reduced by more than 60 percent.

"We were seeing consistent bottlenecks and slowdowns within our critical SAP applications functioning on the spinning disk system," said Shawn O'Brien, Director of Infrastructure and Architecture for Room & Board. "The lion's share of issues were gone the second we got off spinning disk and onto Pure Storage with consistent sub-millisecond latency."

While Room & Board's initial plan for the Pure FlashArray was to support only its SAP workloads, the IT team saw how quickly the SAP performance issue abated and elected to test Pure on other applications. The team cautiously added new loads, including Citrix XenApp, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and more. "We just kept throwing more at it, and it ingested it without a hiccup," said O'Brien.

"As a Premier Plus member of our Citrix Ready program, Pure Storage has completed a rigorous verification process to ensure compatibility with XenApp to ensure the confidence that mutual customers, like Room & Board, have come to expect," said Siddharth Rabindran, director, Citrix Ready. "When deployed with XenApp, Pure Storage helps eliminate high app, desktop and infrastructure costs and complexities. Together we enable customers to benefit from the secure delivery of apps and data for their organizations."

Ease of administration has also proved to be a major benefit. "The IT team doesn't have to do anything for the Pure environment," said O'Brien. "Pure just does it all for you." And because storage administration is so streamlined – along with factors like reduced rack space, reduced power costs and Pure's no-forklift-upgrade Evergreen Storage program – Room & Board has achieved a lower long-term operating budget for storage. "The multiple dimensions of ROI from Pure easily justify our purchase decision," said O'Brien.

"By embracing the shift from fundamentally slow disk technologies to an all-flash environment, Room & Board has been able to capitalize on the truly transformative capabilities that flash from Pure Storage offers," said Jonathan Martin, CMO, Pure Storage. "Room & Board chose Pure to address a specific pain point, but found increased value in additional deployments throughout the organization – a trend we've seen over and over since first going to market – and it's particularly gratifying to see the tangible savings in time, resources and efficiency that our customers achieve."

About Room & Board
For more than 35 years, Room & Board has focused on the simple idea that good design should be beautiful, affordable and long-lasting. We work closely with American artisans to offer modern furniture and accessories—even custom pieces—that fit the needs of modern life. We're proud that more than 90 percent of the products we sell are handcrafted in the U.S. to give customers the best combination of quality and price. Room & Board has stores in Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Costa Mesa, Washington, D.C., Seattle and Boston. For more information, visit roomandboard.com or call 800-486-6554.

About Pure Storage
Pure Storage (NYSE:PSTG) accelerates possible, transforming businesses in ways previously unimagined. The company's disruptive, software-driven storage technology combined with a customer-friendly business model drives business and IT transformation for customers through dramatic increases in performance and efficiency at lower costs. Pure Storage FlashArray//m is simpler, faster and more elegant than any other technology in the datacenter. FlashArray//m is ideal for the move toward big data and for performance-intensive workloads such as cloud computing, database systems, desktop virtualization, real-time analytics and server virtualization. With Pure's industry leading certified NPS score of 79, Pure customers are some of the happiest in the world, and include large and mid-size organizations across a range of industries: cloud-based software and service providers, consumer web, education, energy, financial services, governments, healthcare, manufacturing, media, retail and telecommunications. With Pure Storage, companies push the boundaries of what's possible to become faster, smarter and more innovative.

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